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THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 



THE MARGIN OF 
HESITATION 



BY 

FRANK MOORE COLBY 

M 

Author of 

"Imaginary Obligations" and "Constrained 
Attitudes" 




NEW YORK 
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 

1921 






COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY 
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, INC. 



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©CI.A627634 



PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. 



NOV -8 '2 



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CONTENTS 

I Trolley Cars and Democratic Raptures 2 

II Thinking It Through in Haste 11 

III The Language or Feminist Debate 23 

IV Pleasures of Anxiety 48 

V Hating Backwards 58 

VI After the War in Thompsontown 71 

VII International Cancellation 85 

VIII The Lesson of Literary War Losses. . . 93 

IX On Behalf of Harold McChamber 106 

X Subsidizing Authors 113 

XI Incorporated Taste 119 

XII Barbarians and the Critic 126 

XIII Reviewer's Cramp 135 

XIV How to Hate Shakespeare 145 

XV Confessions of a Gallomaniac 154 

XVI The Classic Debate 173 

XVII The Choice of Bad Manners 189 

XVIII Tailor Blood and the Aristocracy or 

Fiction 205 

XIX Our Refinement 213 



THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 



THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

TROLLEY-CARS AND DEMOCRATIC 
RAPTURES 

If the appearance of the people on both sides 
of the car shakes your confidence in the future of 
democracy; if, while your eye travels along those 
two deadly parallels of blank-featured human 
latitude, you mutter to yourself, " Blood will tell, 
and after all class systems are necessary," and 
wonder what the world will come to when it is 
left to the plain people, such exceedingly plain 
people, for example, as those five awful ones 
nearest the door; and if you feel all your radical- 
ism oozing out of you, including the initiative 
and referendum, recall of judges, short ballot, and 
proportionate taxation of swollen fortunes; and 
if, as six more of them get in each with a face 
like a boiled potato, you begin to distrust the 
whole foundation of popular rights, even trial by 
jury, even habeas corpus; if, I say, this sort of 
thing happens to you now and again, as no doubt 
it does, there is always an easy means of con- 
solation. 



2 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

Photographs of European royal families were 
published almost every week during the war, and 
can be obtained from the files of the newspaper 
supplements. Clip them and paste them properly 
and they will cure this phase of democratic melan- 
choly. I have here a set of Hapsburgs whose 
faces if placed side by side would be as desolating 
as anything ever contemplated in the subway. 
Line a trolley-car with these Hohenzollern heads 
(without any helmets on them, naturally) and no 
one would suspect the presence of any person 
above the rank of gasfitter. He would merely 
suspect that the car was headed for the borough 
of the Bronx. Add to the rich supply of wooden 
visages in the various branches of these two 
families, all the pudgy, inane, commonplace, un- 
pleasant, or commercial countenances possessed by 
the members of every other royal or ducal dynasty 
for the past century or two; place them in two 
rows with only the heads showing, and you will 
feel as you would feel on the way to Coney 
Island on a Sunday afternoon, except perhaps that 
you will miss the kingly features of the Long 
Island railroad conductor, or the royal bearing 
of his youthful heir apparent, the brakeman. My 
own collection of royal personages — and I have 
no reason to think the photographs inaccurate — 
makes every morning subway trip seem like a 
royal progress. 



TROLLEY CARS AND RAPTURES 3 

But though reconciled to the future of de- 
mocracy, including that of the people in the sub- 
way, I cannot be sanguine about it. The pleasures 
of the advanced thinkers who assure me of it 
are denied me. I never have any luck in picking 
out the signs of the times. Even when I do suc- 
ceed in catching up with an advanced thinker I 
never share that bright and early feeling. For 
example, I once got abreast of a man much ad- 
mired in his day for mental forwardness. I for- 
get his name, but recall that it was short and 
energetic, and suited to this Age of Steel — some- 
thing like Chuggs, I think. He had been pent 
up as a young man in some college professorship, 
but had broken away and was lecturing on pro- 
gress along all the principal railways of the 
country. 

Professor Chuggs was one of those who as- 
sure us at short intervals that the present moment 
is the most egregious moment of the most egregi- 
ous year of the most egregious century that "the 
world has ever seen," and that the next moment 
will be more egregious still. He wrote a good 
many of those articles before the war which de- 
clared that China is turning over in her sleep and 
that Persia is buzzing; that in the waste places of 
Africa five business men will soon be blooming 
where one blade of grass had grown before ; that 
through the mighty arteries of commerce the Life- 



4 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

blood of civilization is coursing to the extremities 
of the earth; that already there is open plumbing 
in Patagonia and that steam drills are busy in 
Tibet. He used correctly all the terms employed 
in his business, including "giant strides." 

His magazine, "The On-Rush," which was de- 
fined in a sub-title as "A Handbook of the Coming 
Cataclysm," announced as its policy the avoidance 
of conformity with "every bourgeois conception," 
which, in its application seemed simple enough; 
for the writers had merely to find out what a bour- 
geois conception was, and then take a flying leap 
away from it, no matter in what direction. It 
opened with a "Hymn to Moral Rapidity," of 
which one stanza ran, as I remember, something 
like this : 

One thought in the bush is worth two in the head, 
And a dogma's the clutch of the hand of the dead; 
So pull, pull away from the sands of Cathay, 
And forge to the forefront and strip for the fray. 
Up and off with your mind in the morning. 

So it tossed systems of philosophy about like 
bean-bags, hit off each classic writer in a phrase 
careless but final, was on familiar joking terms 
with all the sciences, explained woman, silenced 
history summed up everything and everybody — 
the human race, the fathers of the church, genius, 
love, marriage, and the future state. In short, 



TROLLEY CARS AND RAPTURES 5 

each page was conscientiously prepared as a mus- 
tard-plaster to draw the blood to some unused 
portion of the reader's intellect. 

Yet it had no such effect. On the contrary, 
one gathered from it nothing more specific or ex- 
citing than that materialism was an inadequate 
philosophy, that socialism was in the air, that 
there was corruption in politics, that education 
did not educate, and that marriage was a good 
deal of a bother. Apparently the editor and con- 
tributors had nerved themselves by battle songs 
into repeating these common remarks of the tea- 
table, all in a tone of desperate valor, as if hourly 
expecting each one of them to> be their last. 

I suppose there must be " new thinkers" in this 
country, and that they must sometimes come out 
on the news-stands. Yet a "new thinker," when 
studied closely, is merely a man who does not 
know what other people have thought. The 
" new thinker," if I may attempt a definition de- 
rived from my own unfortunate magazine read- 
ings, i9 a person who aspires to an eccentricity 
far beyond the limits of his nature. He is a 
fugitive from commonplace, but without the 
means of effecting his escape. 

Not that I deny the approach of the social 
revolution. I merely say that since the social 
revolution will come about through the sort of 
people one ordinarily meets, it will not be par- 



6 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

ticularly exciting. This extreme excitement of 
many social thinkers over the people one ordi- 
narily meets has nothing to do with the nature 
of the people; it is a free gift of the temperament 
of the thinkers themselves. 

Possessed of this light, gay, literary disposition 
they will often bubble over at the sight of persons 
and objects that leave almost everybody feeling 
rather spiritless. For example, an American so- 
cial thinker, presumably a middle-aged person 
and living in one of the most prudent portions of 
New England, that is to say near Mount Tom 
in the state of Massachusetts, can become ecstatic 
at the bare thought of an American business man. 
According to him this business man "plays with 
the earth mightily," and " grasps the earth and 
the sky, like music." Railroads remind this social 
thinker of Heaven. 

Life is no tangled web for him, nor is the 
world in the slightest degree unintelligible. War 
and wickedness and all that sort of thing used to 
trouble him a good deal, he says, but that was 
before he had really thought them out; now he 
feels quite comfortable about them. What is the 
use of "puttering," he says, "theorizing, historiciz- 
ing, diplomatizing?" Get down to business and 
look humanity in the eye. People, he finds, are not 
so bad as they seem, and the only trouble with 
them is that living in a machine age they have got 



TROLLEY CARS AND RAPTURES 7 

caught in the machinery. The way out of it is 
easy. It is simply a matter of inspiring million- 
aire business men. "The inspired millionaire " 
surrounded by his " inspired or elated labor " will 
soon be filling the world with the " awful, beauti- 
ful resistless tread of the feet of the men of 
peace." 

Now this may well be true. Nobody knows 
what might have happened already if Mr. Mor- 
gan, or the Rockefellers had had the advantages 
of Moses. Or take a simpler case. Suppose the 
president of the Boston and Maine railway passes 
a night alone with this social thinker on the cloud- 
capped summit of Mount Tom Massachusetts, 
and comes down the next morning with eyes 
aflame. He returns transfigured to his office and 
soon the inspiration runs all along the line, stock- 
holders dancing and praising God, trains starting 
on time amid Hosannas, and the seven devils that 
are in every baggageman turned into swine and 
drowned. Sanctification of other lines soon fol- 
lows, and there is no reason, assuming the divine 
nature of the guidance, why it should not spread 
rapidly throughout the world. There is no doubt 
that by inspiring millionaire business men suffi- 
ciently anything can be done. But for that mat- 
ter inspiration and revelation could work wonders 
through almost anybody — through a labor leader 
as well as through a millionaire. Who knows, 



8 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

for example, whether Samuel Gompers walking 
with the Lord might not have been just as effica- 
cious as John Wanamaker on the island of Pat- 
mos? However, it is unreasonable to look too 
closely into this matter. The main point is the 
temperament of the writer. Exaltation can be 
had by him on easy terms. 

On the other hand an equally talented British 
visitor on encountering the " average" American 
business man was recently excited in a directly 
opposite way, and yet almost as violently. The 
business' maft is always the same, says he, " from 
east to west, from north to south, everywhere, 
masterful, aggressive, unscrupulous, egotistic;" 
" a child with the muscles of a man;" " a preda- 
tory, unreflecting, naif, precociously accomplish- 
ed brute." It is a rare man to whom as he 
travels about " everywhere " all business men 
will seem the same. It springs from a gift of 
nature. 

Each of these writers ran on passionately in 
this manner for many pages, quivering, ejaculat- 
ing, singing snatches of a psalm. They have 
" watered the desert," says the American admirer 
of business men, and " thought hundred year 
thoughts," and said, " Come " to empires and 
" Come " to the earth and sky. " Come, earth 
and sky, thou shalt praise God with us ! " They 
are the "masters of methods and slaves of 



TROLLEY CARS AND RAPTURES 9 

things," says the British rhapsodist, and " there- 
fore the conquerors of the world." 

Such are the blessings of this buoyant temper. 
For us rather jaded and humdrum persons it is 
impossible to regard the coal man, much as we 
dislike him, as a tiger, or to feel toward the rail- 
way station as toward the Holy Sepulchre. We 
too crave that vision of the Boston and Maine 
railroad tipped up like Jacob's ladder with the 
shining forms of presidents, vice-presidents and 
directors, ascending and descending, accompanied 
by corporation counsel. And it would give a 
pleasant spice of danger to our daily visits to the 
green grocer, could we, like that other enthusiast, 
regard him as a jungle beast. 

But that is the way with it. Some men are con- 
demned from their nativity to matter of fact, 
while others, surmounting all the obstacles of 
variety, exception, and experience, can find a 
" type " or a " superman," for the looking. The 
term " business man," like the term " biped," or 
" homo sapiens," leaves us cold and a little ab- 
stracted, but in the writers of brisk little papers 
on enormous subjects, this, or any other large, 
loose, shapeless, social designation will often 
arouse the keenest personal feelings and implant 
the stoutest convictions. They can get gooseflesh, 
or even the assurance of apocalypse, from the 
mere contemplation of generic expressions which 



io THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

convey no emotion whatever to any of the rest of 
us, except perhaps that of being a little at sea. 

Finally another social thinker that I have 
recently encountered soars far away from the 
earthiness of these conceptions, far away from the 
earth itself, and looking down from this height 
on its misguided populations, thus addresses them : 
Begin all over again, he says. If the new charter 
of human rights does not re-create everything, it 
will create nothing at all. Make a clean sweep 
of all notions imposed from without; make a clean 
sweep of everything bequeathed to you. Away 
with God, church, king, priest, ruling class, the 
aristocrat, and the old-fashioned republican, the 
school as it now is, privilege of every sort, chari- 
ties, inheritance rights, national frontiers, colonial 
power, and so on with much circumstance as to 
the range and depth of this damnation, but with 
no information as to the ways and means of doing 
the next thing that remains to be done after the 
damnation is achieved. For the next thing, he 
insists, is this : Be the people of peoples, and set 
up at once the universal republic, founded on 
equality and justice. And he is just as elated and 
just as sure that the thing will be readily accom- 
plished, as if he had never traveled in a trolley 
car and never looked hard at the sort of Utopian 
ingredients that all trolley cars seem forever des- 
tined to contain. 



THINKING IT THROUGH IN HASTE 

Though often entranced by that brilliant group 
of cosmic problem-solvers — Mr. H. G. Wells, 
Mr. Bernard Shaw and others — I insist on my 
personal iresponsibility for the state of Mankind 
as a whole. These men are much too busy nursing 
civilization. They regard it as a sort of potted 
plant which they fear to find frost-bitten of a 
morning. This is especially clear in certain writ- 
ings of Mr. H. G. Wells, in which he shows an 
impatient desire to tidy up the whole world at 
once. At one swoop he would remove the shirts 
from our clothes-lines and the errors from our 
minds. The world is too large for his feather 
duster ; he had thought to find it a smaller planet 
that he might have kept at least half-way clean. 
Now see what he has on his hands — everything 
in a mess, Africa backward, China careless, the sex 
relation by no means straightened out, socialism, 
imperialism, industrialism, planless progressivism 
littering up things, a great war and its greater 
failure, and nobody caring a rap — at times it 
seems to his housewifely spirit almost too much 
for one person to manage. And then that infernal 

11 



12 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

human diversity — slow minds, stupid minds, minds 
made up too soon, or not at all, closed minds, 
tough minds, tender minds — what is to be done 
with them? He burns to do something. 

In one of his books he describes himself in fancy 
as going about the country and, with the keenest 
pleasure, spearing all Anglican bishops. Though 
I am myself a stranger to the sport, I believe the 
pleasure of spearing bishops is exaggerated. For 
once begun it must lead logically to a daily drudg- 
ery of slaughter among the great crowds of folk 
who are not intellectually independent or morally 
daring — lead, in short, to the massacre of those 
who are not particularly exciting, a large task and 
tedious, owing to their quantity. 

I wonder if we commonplace persons are not 
right after all in a certain instinct of distrust to- 
ward these gifted writers. We believe implicitly 
in their fancies and not at all in their facts. We 
believe in the world they have invented and not 
in the world they have observed; and we distrust 
them utterly as world-pushers. The signs are 
plain — terribly plain sometimes — that it is when 
they have the smallest notions that they say their 
largest things. 

In common with other admirers of Mr. H. G. 
Wells, I am always charmed by him and his 
heroes when they are thinking things out and see- 
ing things through, but I am profoundly disap- 



THINKING IN HASTE 13 

pointed by the sort of thing they think themselves 
into. Mr. Max Beerbohm described the situation 
with perfect accuracy a few years ago when he 
represented a Wells hero, after a "lot of clear, 
steady, merciless thinking" about the muddle of 
the universe, as finding the solution in the "Pro- 
visional Government of England by Female 
Foundlings." I reproduce a passage of this most 
righteous parody, which is based, I think, on 
The New Macdhiavelli: 

True, there was Evesham. He had shown an exceed- 
ingly open mind about the whole thing. He had at once 
grasped the underlying principles, thrown out some 
amazingly luminous suggestions. Oh yes, Evesham was 
a statesman, right enough. But had even he really be- 
lieved in the idea of a Provisional Government of Eng- 
land by Female Foundlings? * * * "You've got to 
pull yourself together, do you hear?" he said to himself. 
"You've got to do a lot of clear, steady, merciless think- 
ing, now, to-night. You've got to persuade yourself that 
Foundlings or no Foundlings, this regeneration of man- 
kind business may be set going — and by you." 

This is not in the least unfair when you consider 
Mr. Wells's exultant discoveries during the last 
half dozen years or so, down to and including his 
recent discovery of God. Here are just a few 
of the problems and their solutions : 

The future of America : This to his mind re- 
quired instant settlement. It was absurd that 



14 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

nobody should have a plan. They were letting 
America drift — that is what it amounted to — 
and he simply could not bear the thought of it. 
"Let America slide?" said he to himself on the 
way over. "Let a whole continent go to the dogs 
just for the lack of a little, clear, straight, beauti- 
ful thinking? I should be a coward if I shirked 
it." The solution came to him before he reached 
New York and was confirmed in a conversation 
a day or two afterwards. The idea, I think, was 
that we should all marry negro women, so far as 
there were enough of them to go< around. 

What is humanity as a whole doing? That was 
another question which everybody was dodging at 
the time out of sheer mental indolence. What is 
the nature of the world process? His hero thinks 
it out. His hero "takes high, sweeping views, as 
larks soar." He spends five years in South Africa, 
two years in Asia, six months in America, and 
sketches briefly civilization as it has pottered along 
in all those continents. "Pottered," that is the 
word for it. For what is civilization? What is 
it? Why, hang it all, it's a "mere flourish out of 
barbarism." What is Bombay? What is Cal- 
cutta? Mere "feverish pustules on the face of 
Hindustan." Something must be done about it. 
He thinks still harder and at length it flashes on 
him — the very thing — why had he not thought of 
it before — a plan at once simple and vast, a plan 



THINKING IN HASTE 15 

that was immediately practicable, yet of enormous 

future potentialities, a plan . Well, the plan 

was, I believe, the incorporation of an interna- 
tional book concern which should publish the best 
works in all languages, along with satisfactory 
translations. 

Then there was the whole sloppy subject of the 
British Empire — King, army, colonies, Parlia- 
ment, Church, education, London Spectator, and 
all that. A pretty mess they had made of it, and 
not a blessed soul paying the least attention to it; 
so another Wells hero had to think it out. "Why," 
said he, "the Empire and the monarchy and Lords 
and Commons and patriotism and social reform 
and all the rest of it is silly, SILLY beyond 
words," and the hero in his irritation flung him- 
self right over into Labrador to think it out, and 
finally, after weeks of cold, hard, bitter, ruthless 
ratiocination, he cut down to the very roots of it, 
and he emerged from Labrador with a Plan. The 
plan consisted, I believe, in the publication of a 
book to be entitled Limits of Language as a Means 
of Expression — title subsequently changed to 
From Realism to Reality. 

Another hero of lark-soaring mind is annoyed 
by the senseless refusal of almost everybody to 
shape his life in such a manner as will redound 
to the advantage of the beings who will people 
the earth a hundred thousand years from now. 



1 6 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

A plan must be found. The thinking required is 
terrific, but he does not flinch, and at last he has it. 
It is the publication of a magazine called the 
Blue Weekly, whose motto is to be Love and 
Fine Thinking. 

Meanwhile, aside from the sweeping of his 
heroes, Mr. Wells in his own name was doing 
some rather brisk chamber-work about the uni- 
verse. He let in the light on the labor question, 
as one might open a blind. He shot his mind back 
to the twitching, thrusting protoplasm of the 
Carboniferous slime and he shot it forward to 
the final man, half-angel, who should stand on 
the earth as on a footstool and stretch his hand 
among the stars, and he delivered a lecture on that 
final man before some learned body. He gave a 
ship-shape account of the human race in twenty 
pages or so, seeing it through the ape-man stage, 
barbarism, and civilization, and well along toward 
the Great Solution, and then at the end put it all 
into a diagram, not too long for a busy man to 
carry in his pocketbook; it ran from complete 
savagery all the way to the great, harmonious, 
happy future state, and it was only about five 
inches long. 

Some people complain that a Wells hero really 
does not think at all but merely explodes into 
fragments of periodical literature. I cannot see 
the force of this objection. Of course, Mr. Wells 



THINKING IN HASTE 17 

is not, in the austere sense of the term, a thought- 
ful person, and he does not make his characters 
engage in any such dry, lonely, and unpopular 
process as thinking. If he did, they would be 
quite generally repulsive. But he does somehow 
contrive the illusion that a good deal is going on 
in their minds, and he makes them spit out be- 
tween clenched teeth a platitude that you will often 
mistake for an astonishing idea. That is the 
measure of Mr. Wells's skill. The hero's mind 
does really sometimes seem to soar over the whole 
of civilization, when it is merely coquetting with 
last month's magazines. 

Analyze the conversation in a Wells novel, and 
it will remind you sometimes of the cumulative 
index to periodical literature, and sometimes of 
the table of contents of a text-book on geology; 
but what other novelist could give you the im- 
pression that an index to periodicals was a fiery 
thing or that a geological title-list was almost 
passionate? I for one surrender instantly to the 
persuasiveness of Mr. H. G. Wells, and when 
the thoughts come red-hot from the hero's brain, 
they almost always warm me up, even though I 
have met them months before, cold and clammy, 
in some magazine. But then comes that awful 
moment of deflation, when the hero finally thinks 
things out — thinks things utterly down and out — 
gets what he is after — the great solution or the 



1 8 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

great keynote, or the mighty mission that is pro- 
portionate to the mighty measure of his mind — 
and the solution is something like the Endowment 
of Maternity, and the keynote is, perhaps, God 
bless our home, and the mission is, for example, 
the chairmanship of an international commission 
for the promotion of poultry farming. 

It is, of course, exorbitant to demand of Mr. 
Wells that the great idea when once attained shall 
come up to our expectations, but he might at 
least kill the hero off while still pursuing, and 
never let him bag the game. It is unsportsman- 
like to start him off after the largest sort of 
scientific moose, and then have him end up by 
stealing somebody's magazine farmyard chickens. 
Something of this sort happens in a good many 
of his novels, and I believe it results from his too 
great preoccupation with the details of an unim- 
aginable future state. 

Out of an apparently impenetrable past, says 
Mr. Wells, science has reconstructed the mega- 
therium, and he swears that the megatherium is 
every bit as real to him as any hippopotamus he 
has ever met. Why then is it not possible, he asks, 
that the same amount of scientific energy should 
ultimately evoke from an impenetrable future the 
creatures that shall succeed us on this earth ? No- 
body approaching science by way of Mr. Wells 
can deny this cheerful possibility. If, from the 



THINKING IN HASTE 19 

past, science can produce a pre-horse or eohippus, 
it may of course call up from the future an after- 
horse or hystero-hippus, if it has not already done 
so, and if, on looking back, it finds the ape-man or 
pithecanthrope, it might conceivably, on looking 
forward, chance on one of Mr. Wells's angel-men, 
which, in its mad desire to raise the devil with the 
English language, it would call either an angel- 
anthrope or an anthropangeloid. No one will dis- 
pute the point with Mr. Wells. 

The only important point to the reader is what 
happens to Mr. Wells when he is too much pre- 
occupied with these two extremes. However real 
the megatherium may seem to Mr. Wells, to him 
the hippopotamus for fiction's purpose is infinitely 
better company. The imagination can play around 
a hippopotamus but on a megatherium it can only 
toil. In the same way, owing to the lack of a 
generally understood social background, ape-men, 
cave men and the like are always failures in con- 
temporary novels, and half-angels are worse still. 
Fiction cannot proceed in a social vacuum and the 
future space which a Wells hero thinks himself 
out into is, socially speaking, void. 

That is why he comes back so empty-minded 
that he snatches at the first progressive-sounding 
magazine title he finds. It is unfortunate that a 
writer who can deal delightfully with actual 
human beings should think himself clean out of all 



20 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

relation to them. In several of his books Mr. 
Wells is wholly concerned with the thinking out, 
not at all with the people who do the thinking. 
This is especially true of a certain story in which 
a bishop finds his way to God. It is not important 
that Mr. Wells does not make the bishop see 
God or that he does not make us see religion, 
but it is important that he does not make us even 
see the bishop. We do not mind our not arriving 
anywhere nearly so much as our not having any 
company on the way. 

I confess, however, that when Mr. Wells is 
really eloquent about his Great Solution, no mat- 
ter which one it may be, he is apt to have me under 
his thumb for hours. Suppose, for example, he 
should become very much excited about malted 
milk, and see in it a solution of every problem 
that now troubles society. I do not know whether 
Mr. Wells has as yet written a novel on malted 
miilk, though he has championed other causes in 
his fiction that did not at first sight seem to me 
more promising. But I do know that if he should 
write a novel on malted milk, it would, for a while 
at least fairly sweep me off my feet. I should 
believe that malted milk, steadily consumed 
through the ages, on and on, would really produce 
that final perfect human race dreamt of by the 
hero of the narrative. It may be that for his 
wide and probably painful magazine readings he is 



THINKING IN HASTE 21 

taking an ironical revenge and that these Great 
Solutions are only a sort of practical joke on his 
contemporaries. In that case, I have been often 
taken in. 

The only excuse for thus singling out Mr. Wells 
is that he is in these respects representative. Vast 
numbers of contemporary humanitarian writers 
never rise above this level to which he sometimes 
descends. Moreover this body of writing which 
has obviously not taken the trouble even to catch 
up with the past is admired on the singular ground 
that it has overtaken the future. It is the journal- 
ism of prematurity. 

It is the subject or the occasion of those breath- 
less articles on the "modern spirit" and the way 
we speed along; on the revolutions of taste within 
a decade; on the terrific onward modern plunges 
of the novelist of last week; all written by excitable 
commentators who exclaim with astonishment and 
sometimes alarm at the contemporaneousness of 
their contemporaries. 

But it is well known that these audacities and 
modernities in no wise account for the hold of a 
book on the attention. Thoughts just as bold and 
newly dated have often put us fast asleep. In 
books it is not the progress that is exciting, it is 
the person you are progressing with. There is 
not a day without its prosy iconoclasms, when 
some of the dullest people ever known will blaze 



22 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

away at God, government, the family, and the 
moral sense with the most violent intentions and 
the drowsiest results. When the ideas are all 
about us in the air there does not seem any great 
audacity in presenting them. It seems rather like 
calmly blowing back our own breath into our 
faces. "Modernity" is an accidental quality of the 
books to which I have referred, having no more 
to do with their essential worth than has the day 
of the month on which they were printed. Be- 
cause everything is swept away that preceded the 
date of publication, and to-day's superstitions are 
substituted for yesterday's superstitions, and be- 
cause there is an unaccountable tendency to deify 
the middle of next week, which is not a very in- 
teresting object of worship, it does not follow in 
the least that it is a modern book. It does not 
even follow that it is in any essential sense a 
book at all. Literature does not stay behind with 
progress; it moves along with experience. 



THE LANGUAGE OF FEMINIST DEBATE 

I do not agree with certain representatives of 
Roman Catholic opinion that the modern sociolog- 
ist does more harm than good. I would not burn 
a modern sociologist or even abolish him, if I 
could. Considering him as an indefatigable 
rodent burrowing among the roots of social com- 
plexities that he cannot understand, I rather ad- 
mire him, but when he comes to the surface too 
soon, as he often does, and proclaims enormous 
certitudes as to the soul of this nation or that, and 
as to the direction that human society is bound 
to take, I should like to get him back into his hole 
again. And I question the value of a great many 
of his biological and evolutionary analogies. Take 
the man who some years ago reached the con- 
clusion after the most violent sociological endeav- 
ors that the average politician was something of 
an ass. Why need he have fought his way to such 
a simple consummation, when he might so easily 
have jumped to it? Not that he said in so many 
words, politicians are asses. He put it sociologic- 
ally. Party cries and iterative watchwords, said 
he, biologically, psychologically, and sociologically 

23 



24 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

regarded, are modes of appeal to the instincts 
of the herd, inherited from remote, probably pre- 
historic, zoological ancestors. But when you an- 
alyze this it comes to nothing more than saying 
that politicians are like the prehistoric ass, which 
adds little to our knowledge, and even as a term 
of abuse is not much more effective. 

"The scarlet paint and wolf-skin headdress of 
a warrior, or the dragon mark of a medicine man, 
appeal, like the smile of a modern candidate, 
directly to our instinctive nature." 

I see no value in this discovery. Had soci- 
ology never been invented I should have known 
that the dragon-mark of a medicine man ~ as fven 
more primitive in its appeal than the smiles of 
comparatively ancient types of presidential candi- 
dates. 

Laughter, he went on in his strange thoughtful- 
ness, laughter occurs sometimes in political life, 
but sociologically considered it is "comparatively 
unimportant." Nevertheless let us consider it 
biogenetically : 

"It may have been evolved because an animal 
which suffered a slight spasm in the presence of 
the unexpected was more likely to be on its guard 
against its enemies, or it may have been the merely 
accidental result of some fact in our nervous 
organization which was otherwise useful." 

Why all these sociological hypotheses of laugh- 



FEMINIST DEBATE 25 

ter? My own hypothesis is just as good: Laugh- 
ter, I contend, is nothing more than an attenuated 
hiccough, pleasurably reminiscent of the excesses 
of our ancestors. Sociologists can never let laugh- 
ter alone, though you would think it was the last 
thing they would want to bother with. There 
was one of them the other day who after a patient 
study of Aristotle's Portico, Bergson on Laughter, 
Bain on the Emotions and the Will, Kuno Fischer 
in "Ueber den Witz," Cicero on Oratory, Stanley 
Hall on "The Psychology of Tickling, Laughter, 
and the Comic" and some twenty other authorities, 
came to the conclusion that "Laughter at any rate 
is highly relaxing," but as this seemed a little too 
informal, he hastened to express it as a "pyscho- 
genetic law." "Laughter," said he, "is one of 
the means which nature has provided to preserve 
psychic equilibrium and prevent more serious out- 
breaks." In its former state no one would have 
noticed this remark, and now it has become a 
sociological law, highly prized, I believe, in seri- 
ous quarters. One never can tell the sociological 
possibility of some little thing that seems hardly 
worth the saying. Thus if you say, he swears 
like a pirate, you are not sociological. But sup- 
pose you pull yourself together and say: Pro- 
fanity in that it relaxes the inner tension by a 
sudden nervous discharge and offers a means of 
escape from social inhibitions, is, when phylo- 



26 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

genetically considered, nature's method under the 
conditions of modern civilized life of providing 
an outlet for primitive emotions which in an earlier 
period were apt to take more socially injurious 
forms, such as piracy. You will then be taken 
for a sociologist. I do not say you will really be 
a sociologist, but you will look like one, especially 
if you add a bibliography. 

Sociology, as I have lately seen it streaming 
from the press, seems to consist of two main varie- 
ties. There is the sort above mentioned that tells 
in a strange language what everybody knows al- 
ready. You recognize your own thoughts, though 
terribly disfigured. Then there is the full-winged 
or apocalyptic kind that tells you what nobody 
ever could know. This is the sort that sweeps the 
heroes of Mr. H. G. Wells off to Labrador or 
India in order to think out civilization, and that 
propelled an excellent French sociologist, during 
the war, straight through the soul of the entire 
German people. 

But I am here concerned especially with the 
effect of social studies upon the language of fem- 
inist controversy. I recall, for example, a solid 
treatise greatly admired in its day, written by a 
German woman of enormous industry. Toward 
nonsense in all its forms she maintained an attitude 
of extraordinary seriousness. She did not even 
call it nonsense, but enveloped it in scientific-sound- 



FEMINIST DEBATE 27 

ing terms that made it seem quite dignified. Let 
Michelet remark in a thoughtless moment, "You 
must create your wife — it is her own wish," and 
she straightway defined it as a "subjective erotic 
fantasy." Some of the simplest and most familiar 
types of men disappeared beneath her Greek de- 
rivatives. For example, there was he who swag- 
gers a good deal in his own household and is 
"tame and feeble" everywhere else — he who for 
all ordinary purposes might with perfect adequacy 
be termed a silly sort of man. This simple defini- 
tion by no means contented her. She said he 
"experiences a dyscrasy," and that "between his 
sexual life and his career as a citizen there exists 
a latent contradiction which secretly is, perhaps, 
as great a trial to him as to the wife who is de- 
pendent on him." A licentious, domineering man, 
a weak, passive, crafty, false, or ludicrous woman, 
is an acratic person — that is to say, a "partially 
developed being whose whole personality is deter- 
mined by teleological sex characteristics." They 
are exponents of "centrifugal sexuality." On the 
other hand, persons like the Christian saints are 
iliastric, "the highest type of centripetal sexual- 
ity." Better still are the synthetic folk whose 
sexuality is an equilibrium of the centrifugal and 
the centripetal sexual tendency. She seemed to 
have caught some bad verbal habit from almost 
every science she had studied, but she had no 



28 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

doubt suffered the most from sociology. Take, 
for example, the simple and familiar precept that 
women should advance in morality and intelligence 
so far as possible without shattering the outward 
decencies. What mind uncorrupted by the social 
sciences would conceal it under this? 

To emancipate oneself from the ethical normative of 
femininity, which fetters individuality because of the 
teleological limits of sex, is a distinct right. But to pre- 
serve its formal quality is the task of a free personality. 

There was one good result, however, from her 
excessive industry. She did some excellent de- 
structive work on the subject of Woman in Gen- 
eral. Many pages of her arguments may be 
summed up in the single and apparently sound 
thesis that Woman, with a capital letter, is a myth, 
and that only women are realities. After a care- 
ful study of men's general statements about 
Woman she concluded that Woman is merely a 
"subjective fetish of sex," having no existence out- 
side the brain of the thinker. She made the fol- 
lowing collection of the foolish and contradictory 
remarks of the thinkers : There is Lotze saying 
that "the female hates analysis" and therefore 
cannot distinguish the true from the false. There 
is Lafitte saying that "the female prefers an- 
alysis." There is Kingsley calling her "the only 
true missionary of civilization," and Pope calling 



FEMINIST DEBATE 29 

her a rake at heart; Havelock Ellis saying that 
she cannot work under pressure, and Von Horn 
saying that in the fulfilling of heavy requirements 
she puts a man to shame; M. de Lambert that she 
plays with love; Krafft-Ebing that her heart is 
toward monogamy; Brissac that "souls have no 
sex," Feuerbach that they have; Laura Marholm 
that "the significance of woman is man," Frau 
Andreas Salome that woman is one "who en- 
deavors to realize an ever broader, ever richer 
unfolding of her innate self;" Havelock Ellis that 
nervous irritability has ever been her peculiar 
characteristic; Mobius that women are "strongly 
conservative and hate all innovation;" Hippel that 
"the spirit of revolution broods over the female 
sex;" Lecky that woman is superior both in in- 
stinctive virtues and in those which arise from a 
sense of duty; Lombroso that there is "a half- 
criminaloid being even in the normal woman;" 
Bachhofer that "Law is innate in women;" and 
von Hartmann that the whole sex is unjust and 
unfair. 

This seems a fair illustration of the condition 
of men when they write about Woman. In con- 
temporary writings their state is even worse. In 
reading all the little papers on this giant theme 
I have often wondered what it is that so balloons 
Man's thoughts of Woman just when he is about 
to print an article and at no other time — the sort 



30 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

of man who could not fathom a single concrete 
personality. Why this mad rush of certainties 
with Man and Woman and Marriage and Society 
and God and Cosmos crammed into nutshells and 
all dispatched in about five thousand words. By 
what apocolocyntosis or pumpkin-change should 
the head of a journalistic comprise of a sudden a 
"Female Cosmos" merely because he wants to 
write an article ? By what miraculous distention 
was an entire Superwoman squeezed into the tight, 
three-cornered intellect of Mr. Bernard Shaw? 
For some of the most charming writers of our day 
seem subject to this strange inflation. Woman, 
the Female Cosmos, "vast, broad, universal, and 
liberal; "Woman, the Superwoman, "ever pursu- 
ing Man at the behest of the Life Force" — what 
in the world is any middle-sized intellect to do 
about her? One thing is certain: There is no 
possible chance of disproving anything that the 
light literary character who invents her may have 
chosen to lay at her door. Refutation in this airy 
region is impracticable. Yet no matter how frivol- 
ous the writer may be, some feminist attempts 
the refutation. 

A few years ago, for example, some harmless 
professor of biology let his mind sweep from the 
feminine germ cell all the way down to Mrs. Pank- 
hurst, and filled a page of a Sunday newspaper 
with guesses as to Woman's place in nature, in 



FEMINIST DEBATE 31 

human history, and throughout all future time. 
For aught a finite mind could tell, they may have 
been good guesses, but it is not likely that even 
the professor himself had any deep conviction that 
in so large and blank a matter he was guessing 
right; he was thinking rather of filling that page 
of the newspaper. Yet his words were taken 
seriously at the time, and several women writers 
are even now rebuking him for his "views," 
though I am sure he was guiltless of holding any. 
Nobody has any "views" on the subject of 
Woman. When a man begins a sentence with the 
word "Woman" you may at all times, everywhere, 
blame him for the beginning, but you have no 
right to quarrel with any way in which he may 
choose to let it end. Yet to these careless, large 
assertions women retort seriously, even bitterly, 
and will often toil with might and main at their 
refutation. 

Once, for example, the woman suffragists 
throughout this country, stung by the taunt that 
they had lost the cunning art of domesticity, 
plunged into the wildest household activities. For 
weeks they sewed things by hand, boiled them, 
and put them up in jars, and when they were 
finished threw them all into a public building in 
New York City and dared the world to come and 
see. It was to show that despite their strength 
of mind they had not lost their womanhood — in 



32 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

reply to some magazine article whose writer had 
long since forgotten what he said. 

And there was one point especially on which all 
argument was thrown away. There was no use 
in trying to reason a hominist out of his profes- 
sional timidity. When he said, as his wont was, 
at short intervals, that he feared the neglect of 
home and husband if women voted, it would have 
been wiser to take no notice. Whenever the hom- 
inist quoted his St. Paul and cited those cherished 
examples from history — Penelope, Griselda, Ruth, 
Boaz, and the bride of Peter the Pumpkin-eater — 
there was always a retaliatory article instancing 
powerful and public-spirited women of to-day who' 
in spite of everything had retained their woman- 
hood. 

This very laborious repartee was unnecessary. 
The husband marooned in a kitchen with his wife 
off voting all day long, was not an image that 
haunted us greatly in our daily lives, vivid as it 
seemed in the pages of certain essayists. Taking 
American husbands as they were this was never 
a natural anxiety. The chief task of the woman 
suffragists in this country was to prove that women 
had interest enough in politics, not to allay the 
fear that they might have too much. 

Times have changed, and politics may now be 
discussed even at the womanly woman's hearth- 
stone, but it ought always to be remembered that 



FEMINIST DEBATE 33 

we owe to the advancing woman, terrible as she 
was, this emancipation of the American male. It 
was not the rule in the American household that 
the man repressed the woman's political aspira- 
tions; on the contrary he generally encountered 
the sternest feminine opposition to any full ex- 
pression of his own. 

For a long period there were few American 
husbands who in their own families dared to be 
as political as they wished. Looking back on that 
grim domestic tyranny of the cold shoulder and 
the absent mind, the yawn, the interruption, the 
glazing eye, the sudden vanishings in the midst 
of sentences really eloquent, who can picture the 
American man as trying to keep women from get- 
ting into politics ? They were all so obviously try- 
ing to keep politics from getting out of him. 

This practical side of the matter was once 
summed up by a friend whose point of view rather 
appealed to me. "In regard to woman," said he, 
"I have no sympathy whatever with anti-feminist 
fears of the neglect of the family. If, with the 
march of mechanical improvement, housekeeping 
grows easier, what is to be done with the released 
housekeeping force? Turn it back, say the anti- 
feminists to the expanding woman, and house- 
keep more fiercely. Let that great managing tal- 
ent which once ranged from corn-field to nursery, 
rocked the cradle, smoked the ham, reaped, spun, 



34 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

milk, stewed, chopped, and sewed up everybody, 
wreak itself on one man, two children, five rooms, 
and a bath. 

"Think of the households in which domesticity 
boils in its too narrow channel with a dispropor- 
tionate force, the souls which go out into wall- 
paper, the excesses of conjugal scrutiny and child- 
care, the surplus anxieties, the many needless 
strenuosities of wedded life. An active-minded 
married woman in these days without outlet is 
bound to overdo her marriage. Suppose you mar- 
ried a very efficient person, and the only object of 
that efficiency were you. Take a woman of 
marked executive, though latent, ability — a woman 
who might have been Zenobia if she had had the 
chance. Would you, in a small suburban home, 
care to be Zenobia's Palmyra ? Anti-feminists in- 
cluding a large body of sentimental epigram- 
matists have had much to say of the home as 
woman's kingdom and the sanctity of woman's 
sphere. But would any one of them wish to be 
a woman's sphere? Husbands of able but old- 
fashioned wives are worn to the bone by their 
wives' unduly limited activities. They would 
gladly see their feminine forces dissipated." 

"The main danger, as I see it," he went on, "is 
that they will not be sufficiently dissipated. I am 
afraid of the great pressure of released mother- 
power upon purely personal affairs. In the politi- 



FEMINIST DEBATE 35 

cal domain, if anyone tells me that women, now 
that they have the ballot, will vote more foolishly 
Hhan men, I can reply tranquilly that that is incredi- 
ble. In the economic domain, if anyone tells me 
that the average woman is not fit for the large re- 
sponsibilities of business enterprise, I can reflect 
comfortably that there is nothing whatever in the 
modern world to show that the average man is, 
either. In both of these fields moreover, the great 
feminine innovation is already so well along that 
nobody will be startled much by the further 
steps that it will take. But when it comes to 
the personal domain, my mind is less adequately 
prepared, and in some respects unreconciled. 
There is a hard reasonableness about women in 
all matters that pertain to health and ruthless hy- 
giene is pretty sure to sweep over the community in 
the long run if their will prevails. Owing to 
certain dispositions into the details of which it is 
not now necessary to enter the duties of mother- 
hood under the new regime will be considerably 
reduced. Great quantities of mother-power thus 
released will be poured into the public life where 
it will take the form of health control, minute, 
inquisitorial and all-embracing." 

"A single woman can often make a man uncom- 
fortable by the application of her cool reason to 
his irregularities in food, drink, underclothing, 
getting up and going to bed. In the new regime 



36 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

every adult citizen will probably be exposed to the 
equivalent of one hundred units of mother-power. 
A certain warm casualness that is promised in the 
domain of the sexual relations does not in my 
opinion offset the icy regularity of the tobacco- 
less, wineless, physiologically matronized state 
which is indicated by the most advanced and 
thoughtful leaders of the movement. 

"I may learn in time to flit from concubine to 
concubine as a matter of course, as is earnestly de- 
sired by an Austrian feminist. But of what use 
is this element of variety, if every moment of my 
life is under the merciless scrutiny of the Inquisi- 
tress-General of Diet, the Women's Eugenical 
Board, the Committee on Private Life Inspection, 
and the Bureau of Sanitary Propagation. I am 
perfectly willing to renounce that attitude of pro- 
tection toward woman which her leaders denounce 
as the expression of a slave morality, but I am 
somewhat concerned by the amount of real pro- 
tection she is threatening to bestow on me. One 
gathers from recent literature not merely that 
mother-right is coming into its own. One gathers 
that mother-right is coming into almost every- 
thing. But that may be merely intentional over- 
statement in order to startle one into paying 
attention, just as a suffragette used to break the 
windows." 

As to breaking windows, by the way, who could 



FEMINIST DEBATE 37 

blame woman for answering wildly to the confused 
arguments that were brought to bear upon her? 
Any one who can recall the incoherencies of 
woman suffrage argumentation must, I think, ad- 
mit that however mad the suffragists seemed, the 
opposing hominists seemed even madder. It may 
well be that suffragettes went insane in an honest 
endeavor to meet insane objections. When they 
threw pepper on a statesman perhaps it was de- 
signed as an answer to some such anti-suffrage 
argument, as "Woman is a capsule covering empti- 
ness alone. Only man can make it full." It does 
not seem a reasonable answer, but then I cannot 
imagine what a reasonable answer would be, and 
a normal mind might be dislocated in finding one. 
It was not easy to follow a woman's reasoning 
when she smashed a statesman's hat in, tore his 
buttons off, burned buildings, broke glass, ripped 
Bellinis and threw apples at everybody, and as 
arguments they seemed irrelevant to the question 
of the suffrage. But it was no easier to follow the 
hominist when he exploded after his own manner 
in generalities. Indeed, the missiles of the mili- 
tants seemed more applicable to human affairs 
than did the hominist's enormous certainties about 
Woman as the supreme being, holding up the 
universe amidst the "poetry of the pots and pans;" 
Woman as the universal principle of Thrift; 
Woman as the Queen Elizabeth who decides 



38 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

"sales, banquets, labours and holidays;" Woman 
as the Aristotle who teaches "morals, manners, 
theology, and hygiene." 

I do not wonder that women became confused 
when they read these things and replied with ob- 
jects equally relevant and considerably more con- 
crete. When a learned and entertaining writer 
took a long breath and called a suffragist "a jade, 
a giantess, a Hanoverian rat, a San Jose scale, 
a noxious weed, and a potato bug;" when another 
still more profound person declared that women 
do their thinking in "henids," whilst "in man the 
henids have passed through a process of clarifica- 
tion" and that "the very idea of a henid forbids 
its description; it is merely a something" — I am 
not surprised that the individual mentioned was 
somewhat haphazard in her replies. 

I do not maintain that throwing a cabinet min- 
ister downstairs is either so desirable or so inter- 
esting as the essays of the brilliant and well-known 
hominists from which I have quoted. I merely 
contend that it is just as reasonable. 

Sex-patriots are indeed a fierce folk, be they 
feminists or hominists, and they have no patience 
with people who in a modest bewilderment re- 
frain from taking sides. That is why the usual 
treatise on "Woman, Her Cause and Cure," con- 
tains so little for us outsiders. It is intended as 
a missile for the contrary-minded, not as a message 



FEMINIST DEBATE 39 

to those who have not yet made up their minds. 
Is Woman that supreme being whose "two strong 
arms are the pillars that sustain the universe" or 
is she that "capsule covering an emptiness which 
man alone can fill?" There is the naked choice. 
Writers on Woman would think it base to hesi- 
tate. And they are angry if you try to pin them 
down to the particulars of actual experience. 
Writers on Woman hate to be pinned down to 
anything. It is a leaping kind of competition be- 
tween feminists and hominists and each side thinks 
nothing of taking six centuries at a dash. Up- 
in-the-air habits have been formed in consequence. 
But on the whole I think the hominist cut the sor- 
rier figure in the great debate. The nature of 
actual women seemed never to have entered his 
mind. Once visited perhaps by Ruth, Penelope, 
or some female relative since deceased, his mind 
was now deserted save for a few mottoes and the 
rush of the wind in empty spaces. 

There was one, some years ago, the spirit of 
whose writings admirably typified his kind. He 
was a man of stern and ancient faiths, a believer 
in early woman, and compulsory charm, alter- 
nately angry and alarmed over the needless 
changes since the time of Homer. He said women 
were sterile and dying out; also that they were 
deadly vermin always multiplying. Sometimes a 
woman seemed to him a little weed soon to be up- 



4 o THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

rooted; at others he would shrink from her as 
from a boa constrictor. Again he would describe 
her as a rat. Epithets that seemed to destroy one 
another were seized by him apparently in the hope 
that they would destroy her. Each sentence re- 
garded by itself was vigorous and interesting, and 
even seemed to have a meaning when you forgot 
the sentences that went before. 

Great is the glory of that woman, he said, who 
is not talked of for good or evil, who hath a veil 
upon her head, who vaunteth not herself, — she 
that is meek, and is not puffed up, and walks in 
quietness, and is mysterious, and suffers long. He 
chose as models Helen, Briseis, Penelope, Arete, 
Clytemnestra, Chloris, and a few others from the 
Greeks, and three from the Bible, and he said that 
women had since then degenerated. To-day, he 
said, all women were like "dogs in a dance," and 
the veil was rent and woman was ashamed. He 
first proposed as a remedy that the right kind of 
woman should fall in a cold-blooded virgin fury 
upon the sugar-mouthed idle kind who lived within 
melliferous walls. But in another mood he found 
this inadequate and declared that the only desir- 
able form of society was that in which all women 
dressed in skins. Dissatisfied with this in turn, 
he finally decided that it was better for everybody 
concerned that women should live in trees. 
Women were never really happy, he said, unless 



FEMINIST DEBATE 41 

they lived in trees, and on that point his argu- 
ment rested. This book was perhaps more ad- 
mired than any other of its class, for it was quoted 
in all the serious journals in Europe and America 
and translated into many foreign languages; and 
it may be for aught I know, part of the bedside 
reading at this moment of ten thousand hominists. 
Now the question arose at once whether he 
really cared for all these feminine virtues he had 
praised and if so 1 why he had no word of com- 
mendation for the sort of modern women who 
excelled in them. A collection of feminine sim- 
plicities such as he had praised was published soon 
afterwards by a woman writer. Why single out 
Penelope for meekness, for example? Arunta 
women, said she, are much meeker, for if an 
Arunta woman leaves the house and walks about, 
her brother has the privilege of spearing her. 
Was Penelope after all more pious or self-effac- 
ing than an everyday modern Koniag? she in- 
quired. "In Alaska a Koniag woman fasts and 
lies wrapped in a bearskin in' a corner of her hut 
when her husband goes whaling." Woman 
"vaunteth not herself" among the Zulus for a Zulu 
woman may not even speak her husband's name. 
Charm, mystery, veil on the head, walking in 
quietness, and all the rest are as she pointed out 
nowadays plentiful, sometimes with cannibalism, 
sometimes without. In other words, the answer 



42 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

of this feminist to this hominist was simply that 
if he really desired these virtues in women he had 
only to look about the world. There was no need 
whatever to regret the passing of the Greek and 
Hebrew meek ones. There were Thlinket women 
to-day who were much meeker. There were at 
this moment sweet natures on the Upper Congo 
and among the Tshi, Wagogo, Kaya-Kaya, Aleuts, 
Bantus, Ostiaks, and Yarabaimba — sweet femin- 
ine natures absolutely unspoiled. 

The writer of the book in question did not, of 
course, mean anything. He did not want all idle 
women killed. He did not want all women to 
wear skins. He did not really care for tree- 
women and he probably never knew a man who 
did. Simple sweet natures, such as he imagined 
in the time of Homer, such as now abound along 
the Congo, would on the whole have bored him. 
And if the women of his family or acquaintance 
had been reduced to any such elementary condition 
as his language demanded, he would have been the 
first to complain. Not only did this hypocrite 
neither seek nor relish any of those tender, meek 
Wagogo or Kaya-Kaya simplicities in his con- 
versation with actual womankind. At bottom he 
disliked them. 

But I wonder if those conscientious women who 
wrote on feminism had gone about their business 
in a little more light-hearted way, whether the re- 



FEMINIST DEBATE 43 

suits would not have been more permanent. At- 
tacking an institution is not necessarily a gloomy 
occupation. On the contrary there is no limit to 
the genuine pleasure felt by many abounding writ- 
ers of our day on finding themselves on a planet 
where there is so much to dislike. Had these 
writers, bubbling over with the joy of demolition, 
been born on a star whose social system suited 
them, imagine how cheated they would have felt. 
Here, things being in a sad mess, they are happy, 
hitting out. But the women writers on feminism 
seem to think it follows from the painful nature 
of the subject that the style of writing should be 
painful too. 

I recall, for example, another of them who in 
a vigorous volume on the sex relations established 
the fact that men and women in this world are as a 
rule very badly mismated and then made some 
reasonable guesses as to the cause and some reason- 
able suggestions as to improvement. It was a solid 
piece of work, written from the point of view com- 
monly regarded as pernicious, that is to say, with 
an open mind toward social experiment. It was 
not a book for the mentally sheltered classes. One 
could not, for example, have discussed it with one's 
aunt, and one would hardly have wished to show 
it to a United States Senator, but it was an honest, 
independent endeavor to systematize ideas that 
had been in the air for fifty years or so. The 



44 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

chief objection to it as a controversial treatise was 
that it was steeped in gloom and clogged by the 
jargon of the social sciences. Contemplation of 
the horrors of wedlock and the horrors of celibacy, 
the woes of all who are wrongly mated or too 
much mated or not mated enough, had lowered the 
writer's vitality. As she walked the streets of a 
bright afternoon she was weighed down by 
thoughts like these. 

There is hardly one person in a hundred of those who 
bear the name of human, devoid of some obscure, in- 
calculable stigma, from which every anti-social growth 
may proliferate like a cancer and endanger the very 
foundation of human society. 

This weakened her as a combatant. She went 
heavily into the fray encumbered by sociological 
and biological terms. She never let an obvious 
thing get by her unsaid and she hated a simple 
way of putting it. In highly complicated language 
she argued that although marriage was an inherit- 
ance from ape-like pre-human ancestors, it did not 
follow that married people nowadays need all be- 
have like apes. Language like this has retarded 
the woman movement. Language like this would 
probably have retarded any movement. The 
writers, of course, were not primarily to blame for 
it, because the books they had been reading were 
just as bad or worse. 



FEMINIST DEBATE 45 

Peel almost any page of sociology and you will 
find little commonplaces that were long since ban- 
ished from intelligent conversation. As a woman, 
this writer if she met you face to face, would 
never think of telling you that you are not obliged 
to behave exactly like a monkey or that for several 
reasons you may be justly proud of European civil- 
ization, or that an institution when superfluous 
will often pass away, but as a feminist she can do 
so without turning a hair. The other eminent 
apostle of the cause would probably think twice 
at the dinner-table before remarking that woman 
ought to advance in morality and intelligence 
while observing the outward decencies. Dinners 
are often very dull, but I doubt if even at the 
most fashionable you could successfully make this 
remark to the woman you took in. But as a fem- 
inist you can carry it off with a high hand. 

Social philosophies have to> bluster in this 
large language in order to conceal the smallness 
of the personal basis on which they rest; and 
when in the sex-conflict the two sides pelt each 
other with universals, it is because they are 
ashamed to mention the rather small particulars. 
A hominist, for example, will often seem to wish 
to save the world from an invasion of unsexed 
Amazons when he is merely fleeing from some 
single female relative. The feminists reply in the 
same manner, damning some tiresome man by 



46 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION, 

everything that they can find in text-books of 
sociology, biology, and anthropology. 

If hominist and feminist ever squabbled in real 
life after their fashion in the printed page one 
might be overhearing some day on the train some 
such conversation as this : 

He : My dear, you are quite wrong about the children's 
school. You do all your thinking in henids. There is a 
half-criminaloid in every normal woman and you seem 
particularly normal to-day. 

She: I might have known you wouldn't understand it, 
George. How could you? Sprung from a germ-cell 
that has fused itself with the larger, self-contained organ- 
ism, the ovulum, you'd naturally take a narrow point of 
view. I don't like to say it, George, but you have always 
been acratic. And I have never known the time when 
your whole personality was not absolutely determined by 
teleological sex characteristics. I ought not to have 
brought up the subject of the children's education again, 
but I did hope that this time you might be able to control 
that little tendency toward subjective fetichism, and — 

He: Their school is plenty good enough and you'd see 
it yourself if your psycho-physical constitution enabled 
you to overstep the limits fixed by femininity, but the 
female ever hates analysis. Never by any chance in your 
discussions with me can you grasp the simple notion that 
the significance of woman is Man. The female's peculiar 
characteristic, as Havelock Ellis says, has always been her 
nervous irritability, and you drive me almost — 

She: Havelock Ellis J Why drag in that man? Do 



FEMINIST DEBATE 47 

you consider him an iliastric person? The children aren't 
getting on in their studies one bit and they aren't making 
the right sort of friends either, whereas Fanny says at 
the Butler School — but why expect the children's welfare 
to interest you? As Woman I am quite accustomed to 
your point of view. Among the Bobi the father always 
ate his eldest-born. The children of the Bangu-Zigzags, 
torn from their mother at the age of two, are made to 
sleep in trees. The ancient Poot father on the island of 
Zab slashed the cheek of each of his daughters with a 
pointed rock dipped in the juice of the toto-berry. Among 
the Khai-muk, Teh-ta, Thlinket, Mendi, Jabim, Loanga 
Bantu — but what's the use? You come by it all so 
honestly. 



PLEASURES OF ANXIETY 

What with the tango and the slit skirt, eugenics 
and the pest of women's thinking, the growing 
impudence of the poor, the incorrect conversion 
of certain negro tribes, and the sudden appear- 
ance of a rather strong article on feminism, civil- 
ization in this country, and perhaps everywhere, 
was drawing to its close in many a serious maga- 
zine article, some years ago. I made rather a 
conscientious survey of the matter at that time, 
and I recall to this day some of the shocking par- 
ticulars. Down goes the dike, said one; and it 
seems to have been the only dike that could have 
prevented "our civilization from being engulfed 
in an overwhelming flood of riches, and from sink- 
ing in an orgy of brutality." Now that religion 
has gone, said another, "the old-fashioned prin- 
ciples of right and wrong have also largely dis- 
appeared." Turning a few pages, I found the 
"ulcer in our new morality;" a few more, and I 
saw the "canker at the root of education." Then 
I learned how low this nation was rated by a 
connoisseur of all the nations of the globe. "Of 
all the countries I have ever met," said he, as his 

48 



PLEASURES OF ANXIETY 49 

mind reverted along the parallels of latitude to 
the thirty-seven populations he had intimately 
known, "this country, to speak candidly is the 
least desirable;" and so he cast off the country 
as one who throws away a bad cigar. 

And consider society's danger from astrologers. 
Abolish astrologers at once, said another con- 
tributor, and also spiritualists and quacks and 
prophets; for if we do not, all clean culture will 
soon rot and vanish, killed by the germs from 
this "cultural underworld." There were dozens 
of bodings just as dark as these in other numbers. 
But there was always a consolation. 

When perils came out in the new numbers, it 
quieted one to turn to the old perils in the bound 
volumes of the file — yellow perils, black, white, 
brown, and red ones, horrors of house-flies and 
suffragettes, and all the evil kind of micrococcus, 
back to imperialism and the bicycle skirt of fifteen 
years before, and to read, say, of Carrie Nation 
ravaging Kansas, and the California lady who 
used to hurl college professors through the win- 
dows, thus destroying academic liberty, and Mc- 
Kinley "blood-guilty" and sitting on a "throne," 
and Thanksgiving day changed to Shame day or 
the Devil's own day by some Boston contributors, 
and the Stars and Stripes painted black and "re- 
placed by the skull and cross-bones," and blood- 
shed in fiction, and hazing at West Point, and the 



5o THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

United States government "shaking Porto Rico 
over hell." And every time saved by a miracle — 
the same old family miracle! 

I could not deny that civilization was then in 
danger, but it did seem to me that in any serious 
magazine it always must be in danger. And it 
so happened at that time that every writer was 
spared all anxiety about any actual danger. The 
one thing not noticed on any of the quaking pages 
I have mentioned was the shadow of the great 
war, which was then approaching. 

The contributor of a peril to a magazine is not, 
as a rule, an unhappy person. On the contrary, 
he is often a large, calm man, with a good appe- 
tite, and more cheerful in his mind than we. If 
one could feel toward any menace to humanity 
as one used to feel toward tales of Jack the Giant 
Killer, just believing enough for a little goose- 
flesh, there would be more fun in it. Any man 
who is about half convinced that he and a few 
others are the sole remaining friends, of civiliza- 
tion finds some dramatic zest in life. It is a mis- 
take to assume that men who earn their living by 
anxiety are at all anxious in their private lives. 

And it is the same way with all great political 
despairs in private conversation. The most de- 
pressing talkers you ever meet are not themselves 
personally at all depressed. On the contrary, they 
are, at bottom, rather gay persons. The hopeless- 



PLEASURES OF ANXIETY 5 1 

ness of the situation really adds, for the purposes 
of conversation, to its charm, by absolving from 
the need of any personal effort other than the pre- 
sumably agreeable one of talking. In middle aged 
conversation there is always a certain cosiness in 
political despair, and the thought of a large gen- 
eral disaster coming on has, at any rate, one 
bright side in the way it warms up elderly con- 
veners. I do not mean to deny that the disaster 
may exist even when it is talked about. I merely 
mean that if a disaster did not exist it would be 
necessary to invent it. 

For some time past in common with certain 
other fellow-beings, I have read the more or less 
radical journals with greater interest than the 
other kind. What is worse, I enjoy various 
eccentric and perhaps fanatical or one-idea'd peri- 
odicals more than I do those of sober cast and 
steady habits and institutional point of view. I 
confess a strong distaste, probably a vulgar one, 
for all that class of periodicals which no gentle- 
man's library used to be without. In America I 
have found more pleasure in periodicals, which 
would be reckoned by the safe person as unsafe, 
than I have in the daily journalism of broadly 
based opinion on the one hand or the monthly 
journalism of no opinion at all on the other hand. 
I mean literally pleasure, for in this preference 
I have not primarily my country's good in mind, 



52 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

or the future of civilization, or my own or any- 
body else's moral safety. I suppose I share these 
peculiar and ill-regulated tastes with about six 
million persons in the English-speaking world. 
We are considered a small band, and dangerous, 
for some reason, though the thing that most often 
strikes me is how numerous we are and how mild. 

Nevertheless it is a minority and most people 
that I know, for my acquaintances are mainly 
among the majority, do not find pleasure in this 
type of journalism, and they too profess to regard 
it as dangerous. In this for the most part I be- 
lieve they are hypocrites — not of course in their 
expression of a lack of pleasure but in the reasons 
they give for it. 

I deny that their dislike is born of any sense 
of civic danger. It is the product of ennui. Peo- 
ple will run, and always have run, grave risks to 
existing institutions so long as they are amused. 
When they are not amused they express alarm for 
the safety of the institutions. It is simply their 
emphatic way of saying that they are not amused. 
Thus you will often hear a man say of a certain 
periodical that it ought to be suppressed, its editor 
hanged, all its contributors tarred and feathered, 
and the premises fumigated by the health board, 
and then add casually that he has picked it up 
from time to time and simply could not read a 
word of it. Or you will see an elderly club mem- 



PLEASURES OF ANXIETY 53 

ber so incensed by some article on birth control 
(hard enough, Heaven knows, for any one to 
keep his mind on, but not remarkable in any 
other way) as to be hardly capable of coherent 
speech, and find him five minutes later with all 
the pornographic French weeklies on his lap, 
soothed again and beaming, as if reassured after 
all in regard to the bloom of innocence that he 
had almost feared was passing from the world. 
Not that I pretend to know which is the better for 
him — the awful Anglo-Saxon solemnity of the 
article on birth control or the unconquerable hil- 
ariousness of certain French minds on subjects 
more or less akin to it. But neither does he know 
and he simply does not care. For the rule here 
applies as it does to a large part of current criti- 
cism that distaste sounds more emphatic when ex- 
pressed as moral disapproval. With most of us 
the moral counterblast is nothing more than the 
angry rendering of a yawn. 

For one person who is repelled by the views 
of the sort of periodicals I have mentioned there 
are a hundred persons repelled by the manner of 
presenting them, and their objections to that man- 
ner, so far as I have heard them expressed, seem 
to boil down to two main grievances : In the first 
place an apparent desire on the part of the writers 
to conceal their thoughts, and in the second place, 
and what is more important, a degree and con- 



'54 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

tinuity of seriousness, unattainable, even on the 
assumption that its attainment is desirable, by any 
person in the outside world. 

I believe there is a basis for both charges. Con- 
cealment of thought, however, — vindictive though 
it often seems — is, as a rule, involuntary. Social 
studies are commonly the cause of this defect, — or 
courses taken during impressionable years at 
American schools of political science where any 
lucid way of putting things is always hated, if it 
is known at all. 

As to the sort of seriousness of which readers 
complain I confess I sometimes cannot see the 
excuse for it. The radical mind seems never to 
permit itself an instant's respite from its cares. 
At least I have never happened to meet one of 
them in print when it was taking it. Pen in hand 
there seems only one of two things for it to do: 
Either to tell people how they ought to act or 
blame them for not doing so. 

It is invariably harassed by the cares of a sort 
of gigantic paternity, and it slumbers not nor 
sleeps. If it did its watching only over Israel it 
might lead, comparatively speaking, rather a jolly 
life; but take its duty to Asia for example. Asia 
is, to you or me, for comfortable intervals at 
least, only a distant continent on the map. Asia 
is never for a moment anything of the sort to a 
man of these responsibilities. Asia to him is as 



PLEASURES OF ANXIETY 55 

a little child constantly running some hairbreadth 
escape. Russia, says he, is not only the acid test 
of diplomacy; it is the acid test of intelligence. 
Now of course that is perfectly true, but if you 
follow him carefully and far enough you will 
observe that Africa also is an acid test and 
so is South America. You will observe also that 
sex, woman, Bolshevism, Shantung, war babies, 
North Dakota, feeble-mindedness of peace com- 
missioners, Ireland's wrongs, syndicalism, the rail- 
way bill, Poland, classicism, ultra-realism, or any- 
thing else he may have thought about, supplies 
the acid test of what to think; anl that, as the 
months pass by, he has gradually narrowed the 
area of permissible thinking, that is to say the 
zone of opinion conforming to his own, first to a 
strip, then to a long line, zigzag and perilous, so 
narrow that two can scarcely walk abreast on it, 
and then if they should chance to fall to quarreling 
one would inevitably be lost. 

Now if you will turn back six months on the 
track of this serious person — : a thing that appar- 
ently the serious person never does — you will 
find half a dozen questions reported as about to 
flame, which, somehow, never flamed at all; and 
you will find a score of problems which if not 
solved at that particular instant were to have 
brought us to the verge of the abyss but which 
have not been solved since then and seem to have 



56 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

been forgotten even by the writer — along with 
the abyss. In short, a six months' retrospect of 
him seems to reveal something seriously amiss 
with his seriousness. It would seem, after all, 
that some of the responsibilities were needlessly 
incurred, or that there were well earned intervals 
of moral repose of which he might have taken ad- 
vantage. 

A special and temporary reason for it in this 
country may have been a too close relation with 
the universities. There has often been an inter- 
locking of college and editorial faculties to an ex- 
tent most discouraging to an adult general reader 
who prefers not to continue to be taught — or at 
least not taught as in a university from which 
he was probably glad to escape. College and 
editorial chairs have often got so mixed up that 
a writer forgot which he was sitting in; hence, 
floods of didacticism were poured upon the pub- 
lic that were really intended for Sociology B. And 
as to chairs of English literature they were notori- 
ously wheeled chairs, all of them, and likely to 
turn up at any time in serious journalism, for 
when a man once firmly settled down in one of 
them, he never got out, and even after resignation 
would be rolled about in it all through life, rolled 
generally into some editorial office. 

But any one at all familiar with the pen-habits 
of Americans ought to know that the sort of per- 



PLEASURES OF ANXIETY 57 

sons he thinks he is meeting in these serious pages 
do not exist. He will not mistake the heavy hand 
for the heavy heart and he will not imagine that 
those anxieties, running all the way from babies' 
milk to the state of Europe in the twenty-fifth cen- 
tury are really felt. He will realize the tradition 
of serious journalism which demands as a matter 
of course that a man shall conceal any tremor of 
indecision in regard to any subject that comes 
along, no matter how tremendous. And he will 
not confound a human attitude with a simple mat- 
ter of conventional technique. 



HATING BACKWARDS 

So far as I can recall that course in modern 
history after these many years, human liberty 
was born somewhere in the Thuringian forest. 
The precise spot for the moment escapes me, but 
the professor knew it, perhaps had visited it. He 
was willing to admit that other races had their 
missions, not without some value to the world, 
but on this one thing he insisted : Had it not been 
for that blue-eyed, fairhaired, broad-chested early 
Teuton there could have been no political liberty 
as we enterprising western people understand 
the term. The Latin idea: All authority from 
above down — by the grace of God. The Teutonic 
idea: All authority from below up by the will of 
the people. There you have it in a nutshell — two 
irreconcilable ideas whose conflicts and alterna- 
tions make up the history of modern Europe. 
Latin elements in history : The Papacy, Holy Ro- 
man Empire, divine right of kings, passive resist- 
ance, Inquisition, Counter-Reformation, every 
form of obscurantism, every reactionary move- 
ment down to the present day. Teutonic ele- 

58 



HATING BACKWARDS 59 

merits: Rise of the Free Cities, Third Estate, 
Witenagemot, trial by jury, British Parliament, 
representative government, and every popular 
revolution, or progressive tendency down to the 
present day. In short, if from the point of view 
of modern liberal sentiment anything in the world 
went wrong there was a Latin devil at the bottom 
of it, and if it went right there was always that 
early Teuton to be thanked. Nor let us forget 
his deep-bosomed spouse, at whose chastity so 
many historians have exclaimed with a degree of 
astonishment that seems unaccountable, for they 
themselves could not have been wholly without ex- 
perience of chaste women in their lives. But per- 
haps they believed that chastity also occurred for 
the first time somewhere in the Thuringian forest. 
Every reasonable American soon grew tired of 
this worthy couple and I fancy the Teutonic ex- 
planation of civilization made very little impres- 
sion on the minds of our growing youth. But this 
sort of nonsense was rather prevalent in those 
days. We had formed the habit during many 
years, it will be remembered, of shipping to Ger- 
many hordes of imitative, unimaginative Ameri- 
can scholars — a wise thing to do if we compelled 
them to stay there, but we very foolishly let them 
come home again. Hence in my unduly pro- 
longed academic experience I was forever en- 
countering unfortunate creatures who had fallen 



60 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

betwixt the two stools of civilization, and did not 
seriously belong anywhere. A good many of 
them served no other purpose than to spread a 
sort of German measles in -our academic life. 
However, most of us made a quick recovery. 
There have never been many people in this coun- 
try who really cared whether the superman of his- 
tory was a blond or a brunette. I, for example, 
am a party man, as passionate political candidates 
are fond of saying, but in the remotest epochs of 
universal history I have usually rejected my pres- 
ent party ties. At all events I have always ap- 
proached the affairs of early German forest life 
rather in the spirit of a mugwump, and I have 
never cast my vote for any divinity that ran for 
the office of historic Providence on an exclusively 
Teutonic platform. 

On the other hand, during the late war, I 
escaped the opposite danger of the anti-Teutonic 
interpretation of history of the theory of German 
diabolism. I owe this to good luck and not to 
any merit of my own. For I have no doubt that 
it was only the shortness of the war, after the 
entry of my country into it, that saved me from 
that same faith in the exclusively German origin 
of evil which pervaded the writings of my emi- 
nent contemporaries. In exhibiting their excesses 
here I have no desire to blame them but only to 
illustrate the grotesque and unnecessary forms 



HATING BACKWARDS 61 

that patriotism has latterly assumed, particularly 
among the learned and literary classes. 

All through the war the ablest English and 
French publicists, journalists and men of letters 
were busily engaged in reducing history to* melo- 
drama with the Teutonic element as the villain 
of the piece. The French were especially 
thorough in their methods — so thorough indeed 
that they went far beyond the capacity of human 
detestation. It was not enough to hate all Ger- 
mans of the present day, it seemed, or even to 
hate them through eternity, as M. Paul Bourget 
so earnestly advised, but they must be hunted out 
at the beginning of their history and hated all 
the way down. So back these writers went in 
their turn to that same tiresome early German 
couple, looking for a prehistoric scandal, and they 
found that their forest life was a devilish loose 
one at best, and that they lied like thieves even 
before they were out of the forest. 

As an instance of this irrelevant and almost 
superhuman indignation, I will cite the labors of 
a widely known French sociologist who set out 
to attack the Germans sociologically at the begin- 
ning of the war, and was about finishing his third 
volume when the war ended. As a man, he felt 
toward contemporary Germans just as you or I 
did during the war. As a man, he was, in com- 
mon with you and me, so deeply absorbed in the 



62 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

Germans under his nose that he did not much 
care about the Germans of a thousand years ago. 
That is to say, had you proved to him that excel- 
lent Germans may at one time have existed, say in 
the underbrush of that Thuringian forest, quite 
early in the Christian era, it would not have al- 
tered his opinion in the slightest as to the Ger- 
mans that he saw existing. But, being by some 
accident of birth a sociologist, and hence a 
stranger to the rude pleasures of our common 
speech, he could not say what he liked about the 
Germans as he knew them. He had to be as 
sociological as he could. 

I must grasp them, he said, biologically, ethno- 
logically, psychologically, historically, and at 
last, synthetically; I must seize not only the 
social soul, but the individual soul, omitting no 
element, however slight, in their mental, moral, 
or material life at any moment of their history. 
It seemed rather a dog's life for him to lead, but 
he went ahead with it. 

He grasped them biologically long before they 
were out of the forest, and he fell upon them 
phylogenetically the moment they emerged. He 
found them, as savages, more savage than other 
savages. He gripped them enthnologically about 
300 A. D., showing that at that time, as now, 
they surpassed all the other races of the world as 
liars. He next seized with no light clasp, every 



HATING BACKWARDS 63 

exposed portion of the German soul he could lay 
his hands on down to the close of the middle 
ages, during which time they were chiefly en- 
gaged in resisting the approach of civilization. 
The purer the German, the darker the deed, 
summed up well enough the middle ages. When 
the Germans through no merit of their own had 
reached the modern period, he grasped their soul 
again ; and he grappled with it anew in Frederick 
the Great's reign, when it turned out to be about 
the same as it had been hitherto; and then he 
made sure that it remained the same for the last 
two centuries. In short, the soul of the German 
people, as seen any time these last two thousand 
years, looked to him for all the world like the 
soul of the kaiser, as described in the contem- 
porary columns of the Allied periodicals. So it 
turned out just as he had suspected from the 
newspapers before he began to write the book. 

Now the German soul to this honest and in- 
flamed sociologist was nothing whatever but the 
spiritual equivalent of a German trench, at that 
moment on the soil of France. 

The sweep of his soul over the soul of the 
German people was tremendous, ranging quite 
easily from Velleius Paterculus to Mr. Houston 
Chamberlain and back again, but its motive 
power was certainly not that of any mere scientific 
curiosity, psychological, historical or sociological. 
Its flights over German history were merely those 



64 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

of an aeroplane, looking for a place to drop a 
bomb. To sympathizers with his. cause this pur- 
pose seemed altogether laudable. If all the 
sociologists of war-time had been hollow, and 
made of the best steel, and if through a well- 
directed group of them shells could have been 
shot at the rate of 1,600 every minute and 
a quarter at a given point in the enemy's lines, 
there were a great many of their readers at that 
time who would have gladly seen them brought 
into action. But when they shot only their own 
sociology it was a different matter, for it was not 
nearly so dangerous to the foe as we should have 
liked to have it, and besides, from the moment 
of discharge, it ceased to be sociology. Thus 
there resulted a great waste and a misunder- 
standing all round and not a German was brought 
down by their compound adjectives. "As soon as 
war was declared there were let loose those mys- 
tic influences which prepared it and which were 
synthesized by the ideal of universal domination." 
This was not a sociological explanation of a peo- 
ple's mental attitude. It was simply a sociologist's 
manner of swearing. A plain man in a fight 
knows at least that he is fighting, whereas your 
sociologist as he blazes away regards himself as 
quietly engaged in scientific research. 

And why this pious fraud of scientific termin- 
ology? As a matter of fact this sociologist in 



HATING BACKWARDS 6s 

his laboratory was less scientific in his analysis 
of the German soul than a French soldier at 
Verdun in war time. He was afraid to note any 
exception to this rule, and the poilu at the front 
was not. To the broader mind of the poilu, 
with his calmer sociological outlook, there were 
several kinds of Germans. To this scientist 
there was only one. The poilu, with scientific 
poise and a mind open to inconsistent facts, 
knew that he could shoot just as straight even 
if acknowledging that there were some decent 
Germans in the opposite ranks. This socio- 
logist believed he could not write straight if he 
mentioned a single decent German. 

The difficulty with the crowd psychologist 
seems to be that he does not allow sufficiently 
for the effect of his own crowd on his own psy- 
chology. In this case the crowd psychologist had 
written hundreds of learned pages all to the effect 
that it is impossible for any one to escape the 
contagion of the crowd. "Not only," said he, 
"do men of different races not understand each 
other but they have the greatest difficulty in 
imagining the possibility of holding a different 
view from their own." "The evolution of the 
sentiments is independent of our will. No one 
can love or hate at pleasure?" "Mental con- 
tagion affects also the isolated individual." "Race 
hatred is as widespread among the savants as 



66 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

among the people." "Men of different races 
do not understand each other, above all because 
the generality of their opinions are all derived 
from the suggestions of environment acting upon 
the unconscious hereditary elements of which the 
characters of the race are formed." He did not, 
like an ordinary person refer casually to these 
laws. He elaborated them into volumes, like a 
sociologist. But not a word did he say about 
his own miraculous immunity from their opera- 
tion. 

As a matter of fact he marched on through 
this book as in a regiment — psycholigical proposi- 
tions streaming like banners, sociological laws 
beaten like drums, analyzing the German soul as 
others would sing a battle hymn and trying to 
grasp the history of the Teutonic peoples exactly 
where in war time it should be grasped, that is, 
by the throat. His psychology emerged just 
where his patriotism began, forming a healthy 
circle. In short, he gave his crowd psychology 
completely over to the service of his country. 
It was, in his own opinion, the best thing he had, 
and one had, therefore, to applaud him, for 
giving it, even while admitting that others had 
given much more. But a man of his mettle could 
certainly have dispatched the German soul much 
better without sociology than with it. It was 
foolish to enter the German soul with that quiet 



HATING BACKWARDS 67 

air of sociological precision instead of with a war- 
whoop when it came to the same thing in the end. 
War-whoops are more effective and less mis- 
leading. 

It was not from kindness toward any Germans, 
however early, that many of us at that time ob- 
jected to hating them so far back in their history. 
It was simply because it seemed to us a tactical 
mistake to consume in the pursuit of early Ger- 
mans a warlike energy which might be put to 
some use against the very latest ones. Yet a 
large number of the ablest writers during the war 
would when confronted with a German criminal 
of any kind fall into an absent-minded fury upon 
his remotest ancestor. They seemed not to under- 
stand that nothing they could possibly say against 
Alaric the Visigoth would change in the least our 
sentiments- toward any modern German of our 
acquaintance. I never understood at the time 
and I do not understand now, why they could 
not skip those early Germans. No sooner did 
the bombs begin to fall again upon the Rheims 
Cathedral than some one wrote a letter to a news- 
paper about the morals of the Marcomanni, and 
if there was a pro-German in the neighborhood 
he retorted that according to Tacitus the family 
life of the early Germans was very pure. This 
brought out a third man with a quotation from 
another classic author to the effect that so early 



68 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

as the first century A. D. every German was al- 
ready a scoundrel. And they put this sort of 
thing into all their war books. I gathered from 
many of these writers that the longer you looked 
at an early German the less you would like him, 
but I could not guess from any one of them why 
it was necessary to look at him at all. If it was 
for the nourishment of warlike sentiment — and 
that seemed to be the purpose of these authors — 
it was surely much better to look at any German 
political leader, or at any pan-Germanist pamphlet 
or at almost any German Lutheran divine. 

When one had for his contemplation an event 
so rich in hostile significance as the sinking of the 
Lusitania, for instance, it seemed a pity to turn 
back and curse the Cimbrians. Suppose Tacitus 
was quite wrong in saying that the early Germans 
were often chaste and sometimes sober, if that is 
what he did say; suppose after immense historical 
exertions I could have proven that they were 
never sober and seldom chaste; why should I 
have bothered people by mentioning it? I did 
not deny that the doings of that German forest 
married couple, say about the year 50 A. D., might 
well have been perfectly scandalous, but I did 
deny that the point was of the slightest belligerent 
value to us in our existing frame of mind. Should 
we have happened on some Hohenzollern, for 
example, engaged in poisoning a well, it would 



HATING BACKWARDS 69 

have been no relief to our feelings to hear some 
one with a far-off look in his eyes exclaim, "Why, 
how like Ariovistus !" — even if it should be estab- 
lished that Ariovistus had poisoned a well. We 
could not at that crisis hate a Quadus of the first 
century; we could not even hate an Alemannus of 
the second, not because we doubted that they were 
detestable, but because we had not the time. Ger- 
mans of our own day were too engrossing. 

One can easily understand that an academic 
person, like any one else, should at the very sound 
of the word German at that time, have been car- 
ried away by his feelings, but it does not follow 
that he should have been carried so far away as 
into the fourth century. A hot tempered man 
away off in the fourth century smashing miscel- 
laneous German objects gave many of us during 
the war rather an impression of carelessness, when 
there were so many things that needed attention 
nearer home. 

If it had really seemed that this manner of 
writing would bring down the German empire 
any sooner, there were several millions of French 
sympathizers in this country even in the time of 
our neutrality who would gladly have seen it 
going on, and some of us would no doubt have 
taken a hand in it. I for one, would gladly have 
had a fling at Alboin the Langobardus if I had 
believed it would aid in taking a single German 



70 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

trench. If it would have helped General Joffre 
to have us hate the Germans backwards, we 
would have burned the Germania of Tacitus, ex- 
purgated Caesar's Gallic War, and tried to get 
Velleius Paterculus into the schools. If it had 
seemed necessary to hate them forwards, we 
would have founded a society of detestation on 
the model of "Souvenez-vous," a French associa- 
tion already organized, and by means of "books, 
pamphlets, albums, placards, lectures, films, pic- 
tures, class-room manuals, New Year's gifts, 
prizes, plays, commemorations, anniversaries, and 
pilgrimages," every one of them perfectly odious, 
we, too, might have committed ourselves through 
all eternity to keeping resentment aglow. But it 
was only fair that we should know in advance 
why it should be done ; and that was a point never 
cleared up by any of these eminent writers, dur- 
ing the war or afterwards. 



AFTER THE WAR IN THOMPSONTOWN 

I wish to say, at the start, that I see no sin in 
the sudden wealth of Thompsontown. I am not 
going to denounce the profiteers of that city or 
draw any moral lesson from it whatever. I do 
not believe that the wealth of its inhabitants, was 
in its origin, either moral or immoral, or that it 
had anything to do with the relentless working 
of any economic law. The people of Thompson- 
town became rich by accident. They did not, in 
the ordinary sense, make money; they were ex- 
posed to it and caught it, like a cold. To attribute 
the new wealth of Thompsontown to any form 
of business activity, lawless or otherwise, is totally 
to misconceive the situation. Great droves of 
business men became rich through their inactivity; 
to have avoided money they would have had to 
dodge. 

Hat men — I select hat men, because the civili- 
zation of Thompsontown all came from hats — 
hat men did not conspire to raise the price of 
hats; nor was there any great, organizing super- 
hat-man who amalgamated hats, driving little 
hatters to suicide. Hat men made fortunes out 

71 



72 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

of hats, simply because people insisted on their 
doing so. I mean this literally. 

I mean that the hat man would have had de- 
liberately to thwart his customers, if he had not 
put up the price of hats. Some hat men did at 
first keep down the price of hats, and their cus- 
tomers scattered all over town looking for the 
same hats at higher prices. As wealth increased 
in Thompsontown, hat buyers not only preferred 
a worse hat at a higher price, but would walk a 
mile to get it. 

The sort of people who became rich in Thomp- 
sontown had no personal preference whatever be- 
tween any two hats when considered simply as 
hats, but only when considered as symbols of 
opulence. A five-dollar hat gave a five-dollar 
feeling and a fifteen-dollar hat gave a fifteen-dol- 
lar feeling, and so on, and that is all there was to 
it. Feeling varied with the price, not price with 
the feelings. Feelings varied with the price, the 
object purchased remaining the same. Until the 
people of Thompsontown learn the prices of 
things, they do not know what to think about 
them. 

Now these thousands of people in Thompson- 
town have made money merely because they did 
not break off habits which, perhaps, after all, they 
could not have broken off. People with shops 
in State Street became rich just because they did 



AFTER THE WAR 73 

not close their shops in State Street. Fortune 
favored every dealer just because he did not cease 
to deal. They did not seize an opportunity; they 
merely waited to be seized by it; and while there 
were exceptions, it is safe to say in general that 
the new wealth of Thompsontown was the reward 
for going where you usually went and sitting 
there. 

Then came the problem of spending it. They 
bought automobiles, of course, two or three at a 
time apparently, and they paid sixty dollars for 
silk shirts, and forty dollars for shoes, and the 
women wore things in the street that made even 
them uncomfortable, and State street became in 
several ways the equal of Fifth Avenue. You 
stood an equally good chance of being killed by 
an equally good motor-car, there was as much in- 
convenience in getting about, and the noises were 
almost identical. There was nothing gay or high- 
flying about it, but you cannot blame them for 
that. Spectacular spending has always been exag- 
gerated and outside print, the madder prodigalities 
are hard to find. People who buy ten thousand 
dollar tooth picks, do it by stealth. God sees, 
and Mr. Upton Sinclair — but not the rest of us. 

But nobody seemed to be doing with his money 
anything that he particularly wanted to do. No- 
body ever showed an eccentricity. Nobody could 
be said in any sense to be having his fling, and 



74 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

while the newly enriched have not the abandon 
anywhere that you expect of them, in Thompson- 
town they are particularly tied down. Not only 
has there never been anything to fling to in Thomp- 
sontown, but there have never been the sort of 
people who could fling. Monte Cristo would go 
in a limousine to the Men's Forum of the Central 
Baptists in Thompsontown; Heliogabalus would 
buy a thousand-dollar overcoat; and each would 
do it not by way of preliminary indulgence, but 
after exhausting every other joy. Double their 
fortunes and they would go in two limousines to 
the Men's Forum of the Central Baptists and buy 
two thousand-dollar overcoats. 

And while it was true of everything bought 
by the great, new, nonplussed hordes of the sud- 
denly prosperous, down to shoes, shirts, under- 
wear, things applicable to the most unimaginative 
needs, it was particularly true of things into which 
the personal fancy might more freely enter, such 
as household furniture, ornament, bric-a-brac. 
But personal fancy never did enter. Money came 
before desire had emerged, and the joy of getting 
was in counting the cost of what you got. To the 
ten thousand newly enriched citizens of Thomp- 
sontown one thing was literally as good as an- 
other, and divergent prices had to be invented 
as the only means of telling things apart. 

This had always been something of a difficulty 



AFTER THE WAR 75 

in Thompsontown and the city itself is really the 
result of this embarrassment. People who were 
not utterly distracted as to what to do with their 
money would never have built it as they did. The 
public buildings were all put up for about $500,- 
000 apiece, and for no other imaginable motive. 
The richer you got the less you cared what, in an 
architectural way, happened to you, so long as 
it was a good deal. If a multi-millionaire, you 
let them build you anything, provided it was big 
enough, and they usually decided on an orphan 
asylum with a front door like a valentine. 

All Main Street was built up by well-to-do 
people who had not the slightest personal inclina- 
tion as to the sort of places they wanted to live 
in. Its domestic architecture is a sincere and ade- 
quate expression of that frame of mind. There 
is not a house in Main Street that does not assert 
emphatically the owner's sentiment: What does 
it matter where I am? — and there is really no 
reason for preferring any house to any other, 
aside from the price. Cost in Thompsontown has 
always been the true key to the nature of things. 

Political economy has not a word of sense to 
say to such phenomena as the newly rich of 
Thompsontown. What becomes of the law of 
supply and demand when applied to the front par- 
lors of Maple Street? If you charged enough for 
bunches of bananas, you would see a bunch of 



76 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

bananas in the front window of every house on 
Maple Street. You will find anything in a house 
on Maple Street, if it costs enough; and that is 
the only reason why you find it there. You cannot 
account for these things in the manner of econom- 
ists ; it is absurd to suppose that anybody wanted 
them. 

But, in saying that the new wealth is not the 
result of enterprise, I do not mean that Thomp- 
sontown is an unenterprising or from a practical 
point of view a backward place. On the contrary, 
it is famous for its energy. If I were Walt Whit- 
man I could sing as well in Thompsontown as on 
Brooklyn Bridge. I could sing all day of hats 
and corset-covers, of shoes, nails, lead pipe, soap, 
and gas fixtures, regarded as embodiments of 
Thompsontown will-power. Nor do I mean any- 
thing invidious in respect to progress. 

In public spirit, Thompsontown has caught up 
to Syracuse, and it has surpassed, I believe Zeno- 
bia, Esopus, Rome, Thebes, Ephesus, Priapus, 
every city in that part of the State. Community 
song, community bath-tubs, community churches; 
public teas, talk, and chicken-dinners; welfare 
works ; public outdoor movements if you want to 
go outdoors; public indoor movements if you 
want to stay inside; helping hands held out so 
thick that it is impossible to slip between them — 
there never was a better town to lose a leg in or 



AFTER THE WAR 77 

in which to be saved from a life of shame. 
Thompsontown is filled with public spirit almost 
as soon as the spirit is made public, no matter 
what the spirit is. A headline carried for eight 
days by the better sort of newspapers becomes an 
institution there. 

No sooner had the new patriotism been in- 
vented — I mean the kind that would hang Thomas 
Jefferson to a sour apple tree — than the clergy of 
Thompsontown were solid to a man for the de- 
portation of anybody that it occurred to anybody 
to deport; and the whole town became so safe and 
sane that it would have brained an anarchist be- 
fore it knew he was one. It would be a madman 
who complained that Thompsontown did not, in 
a public way, keep abreast of things. 

But private spirit does seem somewhat lacking 
in Thompsontown. Citizens of it are magnificent 
in groups, but, detach the individual from his 
group and he loses color — like a fish scale. And 
the lack of personal differences makes it hard to 
imagine a personal preference, and as you meet 
rich people singly you lose respect for the rights 
of property and the laws of the land. Robbing 
them does not seem like robbery; it seems like 
rescue; it is impossible to think they desire their 
possessions. Pillage seems rather attractive. 
You could not hate a Hun who plundered Main 
Street; you could only wonder at him. If a bomb 



78 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

fell anywhere, it would do a lot of good. That 
is the trouble with looking at the new wealth of 
Thompsontown ; it makes you a reckless man. It 
is impossible to avoid the reflection that even with 
a soviet in the City Hall and the whole town liv- 
ing in phalansteries and the dullest Utopia ever 
dreamt of come to pass, there could, after all, be 
no diminution of those personal diversities which 
present day society is said to keep alive — varieties 
of art and mental interest, individual expression, 
fancy, freedom of view, idiosyncrasy — and no 
danger at all of the dead level dreaded by the 
orthodox. For the personal diversities do not 
exist and the level could not be deader. 

And freedom of mind, always so hard to 
attain in Thompsontown, became impossible after 
the war, when the town shook with the fear of 
Bolshevism. Indeed, it was dangerous to possess 
a mind after the lectures on Bolshevism began in 
the People's Athenaeum. I recall one which ran 
about as follows : 

There was no such thing as Bolshevism in the 
sense of a body of social and economic theories 
and ideas, said the speaker. The Bolsheviki had 
no theories and no ideas, and the only thing that 
need be said about their programme was that it 
was a programme of crime. They were simply 
all murderers, bandits, and degenerates paid by 
Germany to plunder and kill. They were ex- 



AFTER THE WAR 79 

clusively the product of German intrigue. Many 
years before the war the Germans said to them- 
selves, "Let us create the Bolsheviki who will so 
weaken the Russian state that we may get control 
of it." So they created the Bolsheviki. 

After the war, when the Bolsheviki were ap- 
parently weakening the German state as well as 
the Russian, that also was the result of a German 
plot. The Germans were pretending to be Bol- 
shevists in order to frighten the Allies into mak- 
ing softer terms of peace. Bolshevist uprisings 
were arranged in Germany and in some instances 
made to look like revolutions. Here and there 
people would be massacred or a premier assassin- 
ated or an alleged Bolshevist hacked to pieces, 
but in this the Germans were not serious. They 
were only trying to make the Allies think they 
were. A German may be sanguinary, said he, 
but he is never serious. When they were killing 
each other in the streets by the hundreds they 
were laughing in their sleeves at the impression 
of seriousness they were producing upon other 
people. Germans are always up to some such 
tricks when they kill each other by the hundreds, 
said he. When they were suppressing Bolshevism 
in Berlin, they had no objection to Bolshevism. 
They were not even thinking about Bolshevism. 
They were simply thinking, "What a splendid 
hoax on the Allies!" Nor did the setting up and 



8o THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

pulling down of Soviets arise from any interest in 
Soviets. They did not care either one way or the 
other about Soviets. The setting up and pulling 
down of Soviets was a mere ruse to produce the 
impression that Soviets were being set up and 
pulled down. Fortunately, the Allies were not 
duped by this affection and accordingly the pro- 
gramme failed. 

And now, according to the speaker, began the 
huge final German conspiracy which, if not balked, 
would sweep from the world every vestige of civil- 
ization. Germany's plan was to ruin the world 
in order to rule it. To do this she was about to 
engage along with Russia in a campaign of Bol- 
shevization in all the nations on the earth. This 
would not adhere to a fixed programme but would, 
in every country, take the course that soonest led 
to chaos, whatever that course might be, and when 
chaos was accomplished Germany would at once 
help herself to anything she wanted in it. There 
was but one remedy. Bolshevism everywhere must 
be stamped out instantly by force. 

I repeat these too familiar remarks because al- 
though they had long been matter of journalistic 
routine in the respectable press of three countries 
their effect on Thompsontown was very inflam- 
matory, and a tragic consequence was narrowly 
escaped. Eager to destroy Bolshevists when there 
were no Bolshevists in Thompsontown to destroy, 



AFTER THE WAR 81 

the patriotic element in the town turned in its 
wrath upon old Professor Henderson. 

Now it would be impossible to imagine a man 
more remote from all the issues that agitated 
Thompsontown than old Professor Henderson. 
Some ante-natal circumstance had destined him to 
Thompsontown and he went on living there out 
of sheer absence of mind, obviously irrelevant to 
everything in it. As a political philosopher, he had 
been known for thirty years outside Thompson- 
town for his singular faculty of animating sub- 
jects commonly put to sleep in American univer- 
sities. He was also one of the few humane 
writers on history during his generation, and 
he had actually brought a touch of life to the 
minds of other writers of history, which of itself 
to any one acquainted with American historians 
seemed superhuman. For the rest he was a specu- 
lative and inquiring sort of person who ap- 
proached subjects somewhat in the manner of 
Socrates, trusting that in these modern days he 
would escape the cup of hemlock; and in this 
spirit he discussed the fundamentals of political 
philosophy, turning patriotism inside out, turning 
the virtues upside down, that is to say, doing 
everything that people have done in the discussion 
of political philosophy, ever since the Greeks be- 
gan. In short, everybody knew him from his 
writings for the sort of man who gave other 



82 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

people's intellects something to do and thus kept 
other people out of mischief. There might have 
been some things in Professor Henderson's writ- 
ings that would have shocked a policeman, but if 
the policeman had read them all through he would 
almost certainly have decided not to arrest him. 

But he seemed of a sudden dangerous to all the 
authorities of Thompsontown. The Eagle-Record 
set out in pursuit of him in six leading articles; 
and four speeches were made against him at the 
Veterans' Lodge. There was a hunt for suspic- 
ious circumstances, and the suspicious circum- 
stances were found. They consisted of detached 
passages from his books, which sounded rather 
sanguinary. It was understood that the prosecut- 
ing officer was about to move and people said it 
would serve the old pro-German right. Four 
young men who had spent their war-time in New 
Jersey talked of lynching; and the Rev. Madison 
Brace, brother-in-law of the millionaire proprietor 
of Neuralgia Syrup, referred in his sermon at the 
Tabernacle to the "poison of Bolshevism instilled 
into the minds of youth under the guise of political 
philosophy." Then to the surprise of everybody 
the matter was dropped and it leaked out after- 
wards that all the seditious passages in his books 
were found in the Bible or in the Areopagitica of 
Milton. 

Now, as I write this, immediately after the nar- 



AFTER THE WAR 83 

row escape of Professor Henderson, I do not find 
the situation altogether depressing. On the con- 
trary I see a chance for the return of a certain 
measure of mental liberty to Thompsontown. I 
believe that instances of this nature may carry 
their own cure even in Thompsontown and that 
more steps in this direction will result in some- 
thing so extreme that it will set free enough plain 
sense to sweep it all away. For assume that this 
incident had been a trifle more extreme. Suppose, 
for example, that some uncommonly vigilant con- 
stable of conversation employed by our League of 
Patriotic Speech had caught Professor Hender- 
son at something heinous — poisoning a State 
Street man's mind, say, by talking about a higher 
patriotism — or caught him with the Divine Mon- 
archy in his hand speculating. Suppose then after 
being thrown into jail Professor Henderson is 
brought before a judge who is a constant reader 
of all the League's publications and a person ex- 
tremely cautious in his thoughts and the judge 
decides, without a crease in the marble solemnity 
of his countenance, to sentence Professor Hender- 
son to five years in chains. 

It would not necessarily be a dark moment for 
Thompsontown when the chains were fastened on 
Professor Henderson. On the contrary, it might 
be the dawning of its day. There might begin a 
new spirit of understanding and geniality from 



84 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

the very moment when Professor Henderson was 
thrown into chains. He is so obviously the sort 
of person who ought not to be in chains that out- 
side Thompsontown the sense of incongruity 
would be instantly and widely awakened; and 
some of the sense might find its way back into 
Thompsontown. Wit might sift in through little 
cracks in the walls of editorial rooms hitherto 
supposed to be altogether thought-proof. Com- 
mon sense might descend upon the people in waves 
upon waves. And with the striking of the chains 
from Professor Henderson might come the clear- 
ing away of the whole nightmare of indiscriminate 
and unintelligent repression and some glimmer of 
a notion as to who are enemies and who are not 
in the world around. Having once reached the 
outer limit of burlesque, Thompsontown might 
perhaps revert in the direction of reality. 



INTERNATIONAL CANCELLATION 

From hasty and disconnected reading of the 
treaty discussion I may have became confused 
in mind, and I am not sure that I recall exactly 
the names, dates, and other details of a certain 
article by an expert in foreign affairs that I re- 
cently encountered, but I can at least reproduce 
the spirit of it. It was on the subject of Lower 
Magnesia, with which the writer says every reader 
ought to be as familiar as he is with the Banat of 
Temesvar. 

Now the Lower Magnesians are, he says, of 
the purest Jingo-Sloven breed, and for nine hun- 
dred years they have burned for reunion with 
their kinsmen of Mongrelia, from whom, as every- 
body knows, they were ruthlessly torn by Fred- 
erick Barbarossa. From that day to this they 
have hated the North Germans to a man, and the 
duty before the Peace Conference was perfectly 
clear. It should either have erected Lower Mag- 
nesia into an autonomous principality within the 
limits of the ancient Duchy or Citrate (that is to 
say, between the Bugrug mountains and the river 
Mag) , or it should have united it with Mongrelia. 

85 



86 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

Instead of that it was provided, by articles 131- 
422 of the treaty, that the question should be 
left to a plebiscite. This gave the Germans their 
chance and they did exactly what the writer, know- 
ing the German character, expected them to do. 
They secretly raised an army of 700,000 men 
and threw it into coal holes from which it was to 
emerge at the moment of the plebiscite, disguised 
as Magnesian school-teachers. This was done so 
secretly that even now no one among the Allies 
has the slightest suspicion of it. The writer him- 
self knows how secret it was because he has it 
on the authority of a secret document, which docu- 
ment is so secret that its existence is unknown even 
to the man who possesses it. 

I should like to see set up along with any frag- 
ment of the League of Nations that may still re- 
main when these words appear in print, a sort 
of clearing-house for international impressions. 
Clearing-house may not be quite the word for it, 
but it suggests what I believe to be the necessary 
limitations of the plan, which would not concern 
itself with the correction of impressions but only 
with the setting off of one impression against an- 
other. As the press of each country is at every 
moment, contradicting itself, cancellation on a 
large scale would inevitably result. 

That all writers on foreign affairs are simply 
guessing is, I believe, a safe rule to lay down. In- 



INTERNATIONAL CANCELLATION 87 

deed they themselves seldom pretend to be doing 
anything else, and I have no doubt that the better 
sort among them are often shocked by the serious 
way in which they are taken by those whom they 
seek to entertain. Of course I do not deny that 
the dark forces, dangerous undercurrents, and 
sinister designs evoked by the writers on foreign 
affairs do sometimes actually exist. I simply mean 
that their existence ought never to be inferred 
from their evocation. Their evocation is constant, 
their existence only occasional. 

Take, for example, the vast Anglo-Saxon con- 
spiracy as conceived by a dozen French journal- 
ists at this moment (thought it may be forgotten 
the next moment) and the equally vast French 
conspiracy as conceived by a dozen English and 
American ones. Dozen for dozen these writers 
seem to me, from their manner of writing, almost 
equally astute. They all have the same air of 
certitude and the same reticence as to the reasons 
for it. Dozen for dozen they are evenly matched 
so far as I can see, as regards access to those sure 
but unmentionable sources of truth, which are 
known only to the writer on foreign affairs, and 
as regards intimacy with those highly placed and 
serious persons, not to be named without violating 
a confidence, who though stonily impenetrable to 
all the rest of the world, pour out all the secrets 
of their bosoms as soon as they learn that the 



88 THE 'MARGIN OF HESITATION 

person they are talking to writes for a newspaper. 

In short, I see no reason why these two groups 
of expert writers on foreign affairs are not equally 
entitled to my confidence. 

Nor do I deny that both conspiracies may as a 
matter of fact exist. I admit that the American 
and British governments, working in the dark, 
may have cemented that Anglo-Saxon blood-pact 
for the extirpation of all the Latin races in the 
world. And I admit that, unseen by any human 
eye, the French premier and his commander-in- 
chief may have perfected that gigantic plan for 
the Gallo-Latin domination of the universe. Das- 
tardly designs, both of them, I say, and I certainly 
have no desire to throw anybody off his guard in 
respect to them. But there is one thing I will 
not admit about this whole black devilish business 
that may be brewing around us under cover of the 
night, and that is that any writer in either group, 
whose article I have happened to read, really 
knows any more about the thing than I do. They 
not only do not mention any reason for supposing 
that the respective plots exist or any person who 
believes in the plot's existence but they do not 
even tell you how — whether by dreams, ghosts, 
portents, flights of birds, thunder on the left side, 
songs of sacred chickens, or hierophancy — they 
themselves got a glimmer that the plot does exist. 

In other words, they seem to take for granted 



INTERNATIONAL CANCELLATION 89 

the plot's existence and then prove in great detail 
the horrors of it — which is precisely the opposite 
of what any serious person in possession of the 
dreadful information would do. He would work 
with might and main to prove to other people the 
plot's existence and he would then take for granted 
their appreciation of its undesirable results. Even 
if the world is rent in twain by one or both of 
these conspiracies upon the publication of these 
words, I shall still insist that none of these writers 
had the slightest notion that it would come to pass. 
The nonchalance of writers who say they see 
a world in flames, would be incredible if they 
thought they saw it. No man in private life 
would casually say to the surrounding family of 
an evening that in well-informed circles on the 
second floor he had learned — or that, from au- 
thorities on the first floor, credibly reported to be 
in the confidence of the janitor, he had gathered 
— that the upper stories of the building were at 
the moment on fire, nor would he, on remarking 
the serious nature of the affair, return to the read- 
ing of his newspaper. These writers would never 
shoot a dog in the light spirit in which they damn 
a nation. When it comes to the shooting of a 
dog, writers are always able to produce some sort 
of an excuse. I may add that when the world 
does actually burst into flames the writers I have 
mentioned are not the ones who notice it 



90 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

Now the impartial display of this sort of thing 
by the central body to which I have referred would 
show, I think, that the suspicion of hostile designs 
has as a rule no basis in the public mind, or even 
in the writer's, but is a mere matter of journalistic 
routine in every country; that of course there are 
exceptions but that this is the rule. And then if 
it culled from each national press the narrowest 
thoughts of its narrowest thinkers, for submission 
without remark to the quiet scrutiny of many 
lands, who knows that the countries might not be 
drawn together out of sheer distaste for the sort 
of people who held them apart? The combing out 
from each press of all its chauvinists, of all its 
imperialists, colonial expansionists, and power- 
worshippers, of its glory-talkers and debaters of 
prestige, inventors of wounds in the national van- 
ity, moral idiots of the beau geste, people with 
patriotic proud-flesh, Buncombes and Bobadils and 
royalists of France, and American manifest-destin- 
arians, glorifiers of a provincial grudge, exploiters 
of a mean and proximate past with no basis in a 
true tradition — this mere combing of them out 
into common heaps as common nuisances to na- 
tions — who knows that it might not work of itself 
some miracle of mutual comprehension? 

A progressive writer in his latest volume, on 
the world's future, is madder in his dreams of 
universal democracy than he was in the volume be- 



INTERNATIONAL CANCELLATION 91 

fore. The peoples of the earth are all alike every- 
where, he seems to say, and if you break down 
the political dykes that divide them, they will all 
flow together in a sea. There are no real moral 
frontiers, or religious, ethnic, intellectual, or 
economic ones, and there are no real differences 
rooted in the past. No nation ought to have a 
past peculiar to it, says he; it is a foolish thing 
invented by the soothsayers. Nations should have 
a common past and listen only to their common 
story, and try to forget their own peculiar yarns, 
mere family gossip for the most part. Forget 
who your father was and try and realize that 
your brother is a Calmuck; and if the thing is 
done with a good will all round, think of the 
warmth of the universal intimacy. 

I confess I have not much hope of an early ad- 
vent of this universal warmth. Even Englishmen, 
Frenchmen, and Americans do not look alike to 
me, despite the large, impressive, undeniably 
cordial and brotherly circumstance that all of 
them are bipeds; and I am no more capable of 
surveying them with the super-patriotic eye of this 
detached observer than I am of taking the point 
of view of an angel flying over them. 

But the attitude of this writer seems to me in 
one respect mundane and even practical. If peo- 
ple are not so much alike as he says they are, at 
least they are less unlike than anyone would sup- 



92 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

pose them to be from the language of the inter- 
national impressionists; and since these folk are 
forever inventing imaginary differences, it seems 
worth while, in the interest of international com- 
ity, to emphasize a point of likeness now and then, 
perhaps even to exaggerate it. 

Since the international impressionists never have 
any reason for their impressions of the respective 
nations that they write about, why not follow 
the instincts of humanity and be equally well im- 
pressed by them all? For a moment at least, that 
is the logical consequence of reading them. After 
reading a sufficient quantity of the language of 
international comparisons I am forced for a short 
time almost into an attitude of brotherly love, 
owing to the lack of proper food for hatred. 



THE LESSONS OF LITERARY WAR 
LOSSES 

Several good British writers apologized during 
the war because for one reason or another they 
could not keep all their literary work on a war 
footing. One of them, for example, author of 
a number of agreeable novels in the spirit of 
Anthony Trollope, thought it necessary to notice 
the complaint of certain critics that his pleasant 
story about life in an English country house was 
am "anachronism" — presumably because no shells 
dropped on it. He tried to reason with these 
monomaniacs, arguing that interest in quiet things 
is not obsolete even in war time and that a novel- 
ist may legitimately go on doing the sort of thing 
that he thinks he can do the best. It would seem 
to a sane person fairly obvious. 

Reasonable people at that time were not blam- 
ing novelists because their writings were not con- 
cerned immediately with war. On the contrary, 
they were rather saddened by the too palpable 
effects of the war on the work of many of their 
gifted contemporaries. From the point of view 
of man power it may have been desirable to get 
a novelist into the war, but from the point of 

93 



94 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

view of literary advantage it was found after 
three years' experience that it was often undesir- 
able to get the war into a novelist. Of course, a 
regiment of novelists marching to the front, each 
determined to bring down a German, might have 
been a cheering spectacle, but the sight of those 
novelists all marching home, each determined to 
bring out at least one war novel and possibly two, 
would have been on the whole depressing. 

For it was clear to any one who looked into the 
matter at all closely that one of the disasters of 
the war was the fancied necessity of writing about 
it on the part of persons who were manifestly 
designed by nature for something else. On read- 
ing an article by Mr. Kipling, for example, it was 
impossible to escape the conclusion that the loss to 
letters was far more serious than the damage it 
did to the enemy's cause. Fill an author with a 
titanic theme and you do not make him titanic; 
you often merely burst him ; and one could scarcely 
turn the pages of a serious magazine during the 
war without stumbling over the ruins of what had 
once been a man of letters. The fact that they 
had perished nobly did not console me for their 
having gone to pieces, nor do I think it unfair to 
raise the question now whether they perished 
needfully. 

Consider, for example, the case of a brilliant 
British writer, who, I believe, wrote against the 



LITERARY WAR LOSSES 95 

Germans about once a week after the war began 
and was unable to break the habit off till two 
years after the war had ended. He acquired the 
ability of hating the Germans all through the 
Middle Ages. He could hate all of Prussia from 
the earliest times down to the present moment, 
and all the Teutonic Knights, and every minute 
in the life of each Elector of Brandenburg. If 
shells were bursting on the women of his neigh- 
borhood, he would attack at once and with the 
utmost fury trie character of Frederick the Great, 
and in the course of the same article in his London 
weekly paper he would find time also for an un- 
favorable mention of the writings of Walter von 
der Vogelweide. Now, his feeling toward the 
Germans was precisely my own and that of almost 
every one I knew, and I need not say that any 
havoc he may have wrought among the Germans 
was welcome to me. I did not wish to see the 
Germans escape from this agreeable writer. But 
I should have liked to see him escape from the 
Germans if it had been compatible with the public 
interest, and I raise the question whether, if he 
had done so from time to time, many of them 
would after all have really got away. For, natur- 
ally enough, in writing constantly upon so mo- 
notonous a subject as the moral defects of this 
morally primitive people this writer fell into a 
sort of rudimentary routine. It was impossible 



96 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

to write against the German morals as we knew 
them without being rudimentary, for you were 
addressing them, so to speak, from the threshold 
of civilized life. It was as if you were contem- 
plating the original ape-iman in circumstances so 
acute that even an anthropological interest in him 
was, for the moment, impossible. 

The Germans as we understood them at that 
moment were not a subject around which the im- 
agination of a civilized man really cared to play. 
As the daily news of pillage, rape, assassination, 
and mendacity arrived, (and no exceptions to 
these rules> were ever published) curiosity about 
them was soon sated and interest in them, though 
for the moment keen, was of so elementary a nat- 
ure as hardly to admit of a varied literary ex- 
pression. A rather coarse cartoon was a suffici- 
ently delicate reply to the most subtle diplomatic 
language of a German statesman. In short, the 
entire situation from the moral point of view was, 
one may say, extremely crude. 

So it happened that the monotonous succession 
of barbarities by which this morally backward 
people made its presence felt each week evoked 
from this writer each week a monotonous succes- 
sion of ejaculatory moral sounds, which were no 
doubt suited to the nature of the subject, but 
which, I believe, could have been just as compet- 
ently rendered by a large number of persons, not 



LITERARY WAR LOSSES 97 

one of whom could do certain valuable other 
things which this writer was capable of doing. 
And therein lay the waste. Of course he acquired 
great facility. Waked up suddenly out of a sound 
sleep, he could begin instantly, "Another brutal 

aspect of the burning of babies alive is " and 

finish the article almost mechanically. But I be- 
lieve almost any one could have been trained to 
find the brutal aspects of the burning of babies 
alive. 

Let us suppose the Germans had taken another 
backward step — a step not difficult to imagine, and 
one that they might have taken had the general 
staff thought it desirable. Suppose that proceed- 
ing logically from the idea attributed to the Kaiser 
that "For me humanity is bounded by the Vosges," 
they had actually regarded all people to the west 
of the Vosges, in common with other animals, as 
material for food and that cannibalism among 
them became as well established and as customary 
a thing in our estimation as, say, the murder of a 
woman or a child. 

The fact that the Germans ate their prisoners, 
let us say, received among the Allied nations all 
the attention that such a subject naturally would 
deserve. Imagine it displayed everywhere on 
posters, noted in state messages, recorded in 
minute detail in the daily press, and assuming its 
proportionate share in ordinary conversation — 



98 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

in short, taking firm hold of the common mind. 
In these circumstances it seems to me doubtful that 
any great amount of literary talent need have 
been devoted merely to showing that the course 
of the Germans was objectionable. 

The case against cannibalism need not have 
been made out with any great skill and could 
have been safely left to much more commonplace 
persons than Mr. G. K. Chesterton, Professor 
Gilbert Murray, Maurice Donnay, M. Albert 
Capus, M. Pierre Loti, and many other essayists, 
novelists, playwrights, and scholars whose person- 
alities during the war were not to be distinguished 
from any other portion of the newspaper. Sir 
Gilbert Parker need not have sent me and every 
one else in my office building a handsome, care- 
fully prepared pamphlet answering the Hin- 
denburg-Ludendorff defense of cannibalism on 
grounds of military necessity, and Mr. William 
Archer would not have had to develop with any 
particular ability his reply to the philosophic con- 
tention of Professor Oswald, Professor Haeckel, 
and other leaders of German thought, that the 
eating by Teutons of a non^Teutonic race was not 
to be considered as cannibalism. 

The argument of Count von Reventlow that 
cannibalism was the corollary of pan-Germanism, 
necessarily involved in the very conception of the 
Germanic absorption of inferior races, though ad- 



LITERARY WAR LOSSES 99 

mittedly logical, would probably not have required 
an elaborate reply. And as more of our fellow 
citizens found their way to the German sideboard 
the less need there would be that the ablest men 
of letters of their time should devote their en- 
ergies to the bald and iterative expression of anti- 
cannibal views. I do not mean that they should 
not have written against cannibalism if they had 
wished to. I merely mean that to judge by an- 
alogies their longest essays might have been less 
effective than the simple publication of a German 
bill of fare. 

People foresaw in a general way the literary 
effects of the war. They knew that it was likely 
to devastate light literature in the fighting nations, 
but they could not have anticipated the startling 
concrete results. They knew, of course, that an 
essayist hit by a bomb would cease writing, but 
they could have had no- idea that the essayists who 
were not hit would be so strangely altered when 
they went on writing. There was no external scar 
on the persons of dozens of eminent writers, who 
had presumably remained in perfectly safe places 
and suffered none of the privations of war; yet 
from the reader's point of view they were hardly 
recognizable. 

Before the war it was generally supposed that 
the effect of a strong feeling upon a light literary 
character was on the whole beneficial, and there 



ioo THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

are many to this day who argue that the reason 
wlhy American light literature is usually so very 
light that no one can feel it, is because there are 
no strong, high, noble feelings in the writers them- 
selves. I have heard it suggested that my 
friend, Mr. Harold McChamber (whose career 
I have sketched in another chapter) , had he been 
borne aloft on some great tempest of emotion, 
would have been George Meredith — or just as 
remarkable — and that if the inner life of Profes- 
sor Woodside were disturbed a modern equiva- 
lent of Dante's Inferno would emerge. 

But what were the results of shaking up dozens 
of delightful authors during the war? Simply, 
that soon after August 4th, 19 14, they became 
almost completely unreadable, and have remained 
so ever since. 

This is not said in an unfriendly spirit. The 
cause of these writers was my own; nor do I re- 
spect them any less as men for their having rather 
gone to pieces as writers. Indeed, they may be 
regarded as sufferers from internal injuries honor- 
ably sustained; for the casualties of war are subtle 
and various. 

The bomb that takes off a private's leg may 
render a good poet perfectly useless for several 
months. Down went thousands of stout British 
seamen in the Battle of Jutland and away went 
Mr. Chesterton's commonsense, as he argued with 



LITERARY WAR LOSSES 101 

some equally stricken German that the fight was 
not really a German Salamis, but, on the contrary, 
a British Waterloo 1 . While lives are nobly lost at 
the front, wits are lost as nobly in the magazines, 
and after a battle there are almost as many mis- 
carriages among verse writers as among mothers. 

To the right-feeling reader, the foolish thing 
he encountered in war time on the formerly in- 
telligent page seemed a sort of literary lesion, 
patriotically incurred. But he was under no 
obligation whatever to go on reading the page. 
The healthy inner violence of the writers did not 
take an adequate outward form, and the fact that 
their hearts were eminently in the right place, 
afforded a moral, not a literary gratification. It 
showed how vain are the current recipes for the 
amelioriation of belles-lettres. Passion and a high 
purpose, and freedom from the least taint of com- 
mercialism, a great subject and a stirring time — 
all the ingredients recommended by American 
magazine critics for twenty years in the recon- 
struction of trhe world's literature — went to the 
making of the very worst volumes that these au- 
thors had as yet achieved. 

Scorn has been highly valued as a literary mo- 
tive, but the scorn of the satirist was no longer 
beautiful in the contempt and anger of his lip, 
and when he dipped his pen in gall — a proceeding 
much esteemed by literary commentators — the gall 



ioa THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

turned out to be the very thinnest of writing fluids. 
Consecrate a litterateur and to your astonishment 
you cannot read him. Put him in a battle mood 
and he gives you nothing to think about, no ex- 
ploding thought of any use whatever, except per- 
haps to throw at some enemy whom probably it 
will not hurt. The lesson of the war seems to be 
adverse to all the current theories of inspiration 
in literature. If you inspire light literature too 
much, apparently, there is merely a blow-out. 

This, by the way, must dishearten the group of 
critics and novelists who, at intervals these past 
twenty years, have been telling other critics and 
novelists what is the matter with them. The 
amount of disagreeable contemporary reading 
these devoted men have forced themselves to do for 
this purpose is prodigious. One of them said that 
after having gone through all the contemporary 
writings of France, Russia and Germany, and 
found them rather bad, he read everything at all 
tiresome in America, and found it worse yet. An- 
other not only knows the exact difference between 
Mr. Harold McChamber and Mr. Curtis Lane — 
which of itself is rather a subtle matter — but he 
can tell to a dot why and how much they both fall 
short of genius. 

Mr. Barton Worcester says the hovels of Mr. 
Harold McChamber are "shams;" mere "puddles 
of words," "stale, distorted" and full of "mil- 



LITERARY WAR LOSSES 103 

dewed pap," but he can pass the stiffest sort of 
examination in them all, and will quote you page 
after page of the longest, evidently having learned 
them by heart. He knows why Mr. Harold Mc- 
Chamber is so much worse than Mrs. Pauline 
McHenry Donald — he even knows why each of 
them exists — and he has solved a hundred other 
just such knotty problems. You cannot help ad- 
miring these conscientious, indefatigable men, 
going on and on against their wills, borrowing 
novels from the cook; following up the elevator 
boy and becoming learned in the subject of his 
literary contemplations. But you cannot help 
rather pitying them. 

Now, the result of all this hard labor and liter- 
ary anguish may be summed up quite simply. The 
faults of American writings, according to these 
critics, all arise from the lack of proper motives 
in the writer. They do not say it in so many 
words, but they plainly imply a genuine belief that 
if they could substitute some of their own better 
moral and artistic purposes for the present motives 
of any novelist, however silly, that novelist would 
soon become quite sensible. 

One critic is certain that if the American novel- 
ist would stop caring so much about old women 
and little boys he would surely be considered a 
much better artist. 

A second critic believes that if authors would 



104 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

be less anxious to appear orthodox and cease con- 
spiring to suppress all mention of the sexual re- 
lation they would improve. A third critic thinks 
inner freedom is the certain cure. And one thing 
follows from the arguments of all of them as 
absolutely certain : Extract the commercial mo- 
tive from any author, however bad, and he will 
be bettered. 

There is not the slightest foundation for any 
one of these beliefs, as the lesson of the war re- 
minds us. Too many gifted authors were, with a 
lofty purpose for a splendid cause, writing com- 
plete nonsense. Too plain was it, even among 
writers at one time quite remarkable, that moral 
exaltation is often followed by literary decay. As 
to the harmless, ordinary American author, over 
whom the critics above cited have toiled so hard, 
there is no help for him from their methods. On 
the contrary, if they had their way with him, they 
would simply make him uncomfortable without 
benefiting the reading public in the least. Why 
free the inner life of Mr. Harold McChamber, 
when in all aesthetic probability none of it could 
escape? Suppose Mr. Harold McChamber gave 
himself up utterly to Mr. Worcester; went to a 
lonely place with him and listened every day, and 
Mr. Worcester really interested him in Shake- 
speare or Mr. Ezra Pound, and tugged and 
heaved him toward the higher plane, Mr. Mc- 



LITERARY WAR LOSSES 105 

Chamber in no wise resisting; suppose finally that 
the white flame of Mr. Worcester actually passed 
over into Mr. McChamber. Mr. McChamber's 
artistic substance being the same, there would be 
no change in his manner of writing, and the small, 
discerning class of readers whom Mr. Worcester 
has in mind would probably never know that Mr. 
McChamber was burning bright inside. It simply 
would cost Mr. McChamber five million readers 
and fill him with a violent emotion which he lacked 
completely the ability to express. 

In fact, it is a rash man who in view of the 
lesson of the war, will recommend any definite 
external or internal crisis for the amelioration of 
any author — good or bad. The most agreeable 
authors of t!he time went monotonously insane un- 
der conditions which, on the principle of a great 
body of current literary comment should have im- 
proved them. 



ON BEHALF OF MR. HAROLD MC- 
CHAMBER 

In those exalted circles where the condition of 
American popular novelists is regarded with grave 
concern, it is assumed that certain of them have 
stooped to conquer. It is assumed that they were 
at one time capable of a higher class of work but 
deliberately turned away from it to pander -to 
the public. It would almost seem from some of 
these articles that the novelist before becoming 
popular has a battle with his conscience, saying to 
himself in so many words, "Shall I pander?" and 
then after a brief struggle answering "Yea." 
Then he sells one hundred thousand copies and 
is lost to Art. 

I have sometimes; become quite sentimental 
about him on reading these articles for it would 
appear from them that the poor creature really 
knows how low he is and must suffer a good deal 
from remorse, even while outwardly cheerful. 
Yet the situation cannot be so bad as that. Indeed 
there is evidence that the situation does not exist 
at all, outside the minds of these critics. Let us 
take the following instance, for which a parallel 
can be found by any one who looks for it : 

106 



HAROLD McCHAMBER 107 

Mr. Harold W. McChamber, of stout com- 
mercial stock crossed now and then with a Baptist 
clergyman, was born at South Bend, Indiana, in 
1873, graduated at Cornell University, wrote for 
no matter what newspaper and no matter where, 
and achieved his first literary success, a very mod- 
est one, some twenty years, ago, with the publica- 
tion of Sally of the Bogs. This was an intensive 
study in ashen grey realism, which won immedi- 
ately a succes d'estime for the extraordinary ver- 
acity of its local color. Not one serious reviewer 
failed to remark on its "atmosphere" or to say 
that it was "convincing" or to discern unmistak- 
able "signs of promise" in the author. 

Miss Edna Ladell in the New York Times 
Saturday Supplement after saying that it at once 
made her "sit up" declared: "The reality of it 
all grips, compels, fascinates, overmasters. 
Everywhere the great devouring, permeating, ob- 
sessing bog. You see it, smell it, taste it. Every- 
where the suck of the mud, the splash of the frog, 
the cry of the bittern, the glint of twilight on the 
pools, blackened stumps, moss, dank leaves, 
turtles, the smell of decaying roots and wet shoe- 
leather. And the lives of the simple characters 
are bog-driven, bog-confined. With supreme 
artistry he has given us an actual slice of raw drip- 
ping, oozy bog-life. A veritable masterpiece." 

Except for a writer in the New York Sun who 



io8, THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

called it an "unpleasant story of mud and rheuma- 
tism" almost every other reviewer seemed grate- 
ful for the way it brought the bog home to him; 
and the late Mr. W. D. Howells in a cordial let- 
ter to the author said that as an authentic por- 
trayal of an Indiana bog community it was un- 
paralleled in American fiction. He compared it to 
Miss Edith Bamborough's picture of mid-Tennes- 
see mill-town life, to Mrs. Buxby's powerful grasp 
of the southern Georgia sand-hill country, to Miss 
Amy Barton's mastery of northwestern Connecti- 
cut upland farm society, and to Mr. John D. Pott's 
remarkable realization of the atmosphere of the 
Erie Canal. He applauded Mr. McChamber's 
courageous break with the cheap traditions of con- 
ventional romance, and urged him to continue 
as he had begun, saying in conclusion, " You 
have made that little corner of the land your 
own." 

Mr. McChamber did not, as is well known, con- 
tinue as he had begun, but on the contrary within 
less than two years produced one of the six best- 
selling historical novels of the period and from 
that time to this has repeated that success at sur- 
prisingly short and regular intervals. Also, as is 
well known, in gaining this vast new audience he 
lost that penetrating old one which had discerned 
the beauty of Sally of the Bogs; and henceforth 
if serious reviewers noticed him, it was to contrast 



HAROLD McCHAMBER 109 

his early artistic endeavor with his present com- 
mercial achievement. 

In literary circles his work was soon taken as 
typical of those broad, low levels that a discrimin- 
ating taste will instinctively avoid. When one said 
the "Harold McChamber sort of thing," it was 
sufficient. Whenever one American writer de- 
plored in a serious American magazine the in- 
feriority of all other American writers he almost 
always included Harold McC'h amber's novels 
among the things that made him sad, and in every 
article in the Atlantic Monthly on the commercial 
squalor of contemporary novelists Mr. McCham- 
ber's name was on the list of those whom money 
had depraved. 

To read Harold McChamber was equivalent to 
saying "pants," tucking a napkin in the collar, 
vocalizing sneezes, vocalizing yawns, chewing 
gum, naming a child Gwendolen, having a popper 
and a mommer and a parlor with the "September 
Morn" hanging in it, and a husband who is always 
"he," a wife who is always "she," and children 
who always are the "little tots" or "kiddies." 

Not that the people who read Harold McCham- 
ber necessarily did these things. On the contrary 
a great many of his readers were precisely of the 
clas9 that would scorn them die most. But had 
their social discernment remained on the same 
level as their literary taste, as evidenced by this 



1 1 o THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

liking for Harold McChamber they would have 
done these things and worse. 

As to Mr. McChamber these critics would not 
admit that he might have fallen by accident to 
this low plane of vulgar entertainment, or that by 
natural abilities and inclination he might have sim- 
ply gravitated to it. They clearly implied that 
Mr. McChamber had deliberately, guiltily de- 
scended to it, stopping his ears to the divine voices 
that bade him stay on high. 

Now Mr. Harold McChamber, whom I may 
say, in passing, I have known intimately for many 
years, is the last man in the world to have had 
any such complication in his inner life. In writing 
his books he never passed consciously from a high 
plane to a low one, or stifled an artistic impulse or 
battled with his higher self or lowered his stand- 
ard to suit the taste of other people. 

The simple truth about Mr. McChamber is that 
his own taste and that of an enormous number of 
other people turned out to be just alike. He never 
had to study the people's demand, because he de- 
manded what they did. He, too, liked Ruritanias 
at the same time that other people liked them 
and with real enthusiasm he made one. He, too, 
liked to read about a corrupt man who ran for 
office, so he made one run. 

When people were fond of strong, primitive 
heroes in wild places, he, too, was fond of them. 



HAROLD McCHAMBER in 

He did not in a spirit of low commercial cunning 
compound those iron-backed creatures with four 
moral qualities and the love of nature in their 
souls. The call of the wild really called him also. 
And the democratic "urge" really did urge him 
when its turn came round, and as soon as religious 
unrest appeared in the magazines he, too, became 
religiously unrestful just in the nick of time. 

Knowing Mr. McChamber personally, I deny 
absolutely that an attempt on his part to climb 
a -high and steep artistic acclivity would have had 
any advantage whatsoever. It would have re- 
sulted in dislocation, not ascent. It is not true 
that the fidelity of the local color in Sally of the 
Bogs made it, from an artistic point of view, re- 
markable. The only remarkable thing about it 
was the thoroughness with which the local color 
was laid on. Reviewers at that time, hospitable to 
good intentions in that field, always mistook pho- 
tography for description. It was their habit, too, 
to find signs of promise. Hardly any of their 
coming writers ever came. And that was the best 
that even tihls little group could say for him — that 
he was coming — whereas within a month after the 
publication of Captain Bludstone, Mr. McCham- 
bers received fifteen hundred letters from de- 
lighted readers who believed he had already come, 
and he had a keener pleasure in producing it. 

"When I wrote Sally," he said, "I toiled over 



1 1 2, THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

it; when I wrote Bludstone I really felt inspired." 
He said he could not get that scene between the 
hero and the wounded tiger out of his mind for 
days. He considered it as strong as anything he 
had ever written, except that one in The Boiling 
Vat, where the poor young man, with the square 
jaw and the honest grey eyes that seemed to look 
you through, faces the powerful president of the 
Big Three System and says just what he thinks of 
him, knowing that it will cost him his place and 
destroy his chance of marrying the president's 
daughter — slightly above the middle height, brown 
eyes with a glint of gold in them, color that came 
and went, tawny hair with a trick of straying over 
the tips of the delicate ears, a light carriage as if 
poised for flight, and a rippling laugh. In short, 
Mr. McChamber has never had to study the arts 
of popularity. He has what may be called a rep- 
resentative nature. I have seen in his morning's 
mail after a new novel letters from an ex-President, 
two Senators, two relatives of the Vanderbilt fam- 
ily, five elevator boys, two out of the forty im- 
mortals in our National Academy, and one brake- 
man on the Elevated Railway. And in achieving 
this he has never swerved a hair's breadth from 
the path of his literary inclinations. His mind 
spontaneously contains the very thoughts that 
would have been elected to it, had the people 
voted on its contents. 



SUBSIDIZING AUTHORS 

I have never been able to understand the reason- 
ing of those kind-hearted people who from time 
to time recommend, seemingly in all seriousness, 
the subsidizing of the deserving poor among 
American authors. As a writer my mouth waters 
at the thought of it, but I cannot with a clear 
conscience urge it. One's humanity would be torn 
in two by the problem presented in its application. 
To clothe a naked author would be an act of per- 
sonal kindness; it would also be, very likely, an 
act of public cruelty. If, for example, a commit- 
tee of the Academy of Arts and Letters were to 
set out regularly to rescue all the mute, inglorious 
Miltons, the result while pleasing to the Miltons 
might be exceedingly disagreeable to everybody 
else owing to the committee's probable taste in 
Miltons. How do these wise men know that a 
committee for saving more authors from starva- 
tion would really be any better for the literary 
situation than a committee for causing more au- 
thors to starve, or that a committee for endowing 
authors to continue writing would work out more 
desirably than a committee that endowed them to 
stop ? 

113 



1 14' THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

I say committee, of course, because we always 
carry out by committee anything in which any one 
of us alone would be too reasonable to persist. 
Alone, after a few trials, one would probably come 
to his senses, but in a committee we come to one 
another's senses, which is merely a convivial man- 
ner of going out of our own. It is not that the 
plan looks merely to the preservation of an author 
as a man. It looks to his continuance as an author. 
Mad decisions of this sort could be taken only in 
committee. 

It is different with other occupations. Toward 
bank-clerks, for instance, one could be cooperatively 
humane without endangering to any great extent 
the mental lives of other people. A "nation-wide" 
bank-clerk life-saving service would be no more 
invidious or unreasonable than many other civic 
bodies now existing, and it might perhaps with 
safety go further than simply pulling bank-clerks 
out of water and drying them. In might even 
take measures to aid them to return to bank-clerk- 
ing. Even a committee could probably tell not 
only whether a bank-clerk ought to live but 
whether he ought to be a bank-clerk. 

But suppose seven novelists, while looking for 
a democratic "urge," fall into the Harlem River, 
and are drawn out by some committee on the con- 
servation of deserving fiction. Beyond the work 
of complete resuscitation the committee obviously 



SUBSIDIZING AUTHORS 115 

has no right to go. To restore those novelists 
warmed and comforted to their respective fami- 
lies, without regard to the quality of their literary 
work, is defensible on grounds of common human- 
ity. It pertains to the preservation of human life. 
But one step beyond that point, one single measure 
for aiding and abetting any or all of them in the 
writing of novels would carry the committee into 
a subtle and dubious domain requiring fine, far- 
seeing discriminations such as no American com- 
mittee on any subject has ever been known to pos- 
sess. It pertains to the preservation of a literary 
life. 

The bodies of those seven novelists, whirling in 
the tide underneath the arches of High Bridge, 
would be, I admit, a pathetic sight, no matter 
what they had written. But only so long as they 
were regarded merely as men. If they were re- 
garded exclusively as novelists and from a strictly 
literary point of view, the occasion might be al- 
most joyous. So little can one say in any long 
view of the matter whether their survival as active 
novelists would do more good than harm to the 
human spirit. One man's life may be dearly pur- 
chased at the price of ten thousand ennuis. I do 
not deny that the committee might do literature a 
service by hitting once and again on the right 
novelist to conserve; but so might a lightning- 
stroke by killing the right one. Why add one 



1 1 a THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

blind chance to another in the hope of coming out 
straight in this ratiher delicate affair? 

Or take a case which would seem to me wholly 
deserving and in which I ought certainly to sym- 
pathize with the subsidizing point of view. Hav- 
ing nearly finished my book on "The Religion of 
Inexperience," a constructive work in moral eradi- 
cation, written with energy and vision, seizing pos- 
terity's thought by the forelock but transcending 
somewhat the mental powers of my contempo- 
raries, I appear one morning with my six starving 
children at the Anne Street Headquarters of the 
Rockefeller Committee on Indoor Literary Relief. 
It turns out better than I could have hoped. Not 
only am I tided over my present difficulties, but 
three weeks later there is a meeting of two college 
presidents, a professor of sociology, a writer of a 
successful novel, an historian, and the director of 
a bank, and out of the confluence of these six 
intellects there comes, as indeed anything might 
come, a decision in my favor. 

"The Religion of Inexperience" is achieved, 
published in four volumes, respectfully considered. 
I find people polite and not unwilling to admit 
that I may be passing on to posterity. As I have 
the reputation of writing over everybody's head, 
giants arise from time to time and say they under- 
stand me and from my own point of view and 
that of several others the world has gained a 



SUBSIDIZING AUTHORS 1 1 7 

great deal. Yet if I apply in an unselfish spirit 
the law of literary probabilities the odds seem to 
run the other way. The other things I might 
have done better are so numerous. At no stage 
of the whole affair, for example, has there been 
the slightest indication that God did not really 
mean me for a plumber or that that was not the 
true reason why I almost starved. Had I starved 
a little longer, I might in desperation or moved 
by some wayward impulse have begun to plumb, 
discovered a real passion and talent for the art, 
earned my own living by it instead of by puzzling 
people to no purpose, and so the ending would 
have been much happier all around. Misplace- 
ments of this sort are always occurring in letters, 
and committees do not readjust them. 

We seem to be as much at sea in this matter 
as they were about 120 A.D., when the critic 
cursed the town for keeping alive so many poets 
and cursed it again for starving so many of them; 
wanted to know how a man could behold the 
horses of the chariot of the sun if he had to grub 
for a living, and wanted to drive most poets back 
to grubbing for a living as soon as he observed 
their manner of beholding the horses of the 
chariot of the sun; said you ought to fatten poets 
to make them sing, and became violently angry 
the moment a fat poet began singing; blamed a 
rich man for feeding a pet lion instead of sub- 



1 1 8! THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

sidizing some author at much less expense, and 
was all for feeding the author to the lion on read- 
ing what he wrote. He wanted authors protected, 
but the literary choices made by the protector 
almost drove him mad. Juvenal, of course, was 
wholly unreasonable, but his state of mind cor- 
responded quite exactly to the confusion of the 
case, and the confusion is still with us. He had 
no solution but the lame one that Caesar should 
select and subsidize the author, and he had al- 
ready completely damned the average Caesar. 
But Caesar certainly seemed to be just as good 
a solution as any of those modern monsters with 
five respectable pairs of legs under a round table; 
those headless decapods that we call upon nowa- 
days as committees to do our dubious jobs. 



INCORPORATED TASTE 

When college commencement coma or old- 
alumni-sleeping-sickness stole over the senses at 
a meeting of the American Corporation of Let- 
ters not long ago, the audience had no just grounds 
for complaint. 

No one of course had a right to expect that a 
meeting of so respectable a body would be either 
inflammatory or gay, and it may seem invidious 
to commemorate it here as an occasion of more 
than usual dullness. Yet the pulse and temper- 
ature of that dignified public body did seem a 
little subnormal, even from the standard of digni- 
fied bodies generally. How could that charming 
and impulsive writer so subdue the seductions of 
his own mind as to sink for the time being into 
an utter presiding officer ? Why need that learned 
professor have read a literary paper prepared 
presumably by a member of the Sophomore class? 
And how could that busy public official contrive 
to give so strong an impression that nothing, abso- 
lutely nothing, was going on inside him? 

Grant the necessity of every unimpeachable 
sentiment and every platitude. Allow for that 

119 



1 2a THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

American platform change whereby an individual, 
clearly distinguishable in private life from the 
social scenery around him, melts, spreads out, 
is personally obliterated, coalesces with the homo- 
geneous mass of leading citizens, irreproachable, 
featureless, placid, fluent, explanatory, and null. 
Still there are those who whisper that no man 
could so completely and for so long a time con- 
ceal his intellect, if he had one; that an active 
mind would surely at some moment kick the cover- 
ing off. Decorum carried to a certain point breeds 
horrid passions in the human breast and the gen- 
tlest platitude pushed too far may drive men in 
the desperation of their ennui to deeds of inhum- 
anity. That is a peril against which dignified civic 
and academic bodies would do well to guard on 
such occasons. These scenes of excessive public 
calm might breed a violence that would blow a 
perfectly innocent, middle-aged gentleman clean 
out of the wages of Who's Who? 
That was the danger as I saw it and the only 
danger. Yet that was not at all the point of view 
from which the critics blamed it. This very meet- 
ing called forth strange rebukes. Some said it 
was fastidious, undemocratic; others that it made 
vile concessions to the public taste. There was no 
coherence in their remarks upon it but there was 
as usual an undercurrent of dislike. Whenever 
the annual meeting of the Corporation of Letters 



INCORPORATED TASTE 1 2 1 

comes around there is always an ardent hope that 
it will misbehave. The comment of clever out- 
siders is usually ironical. One is supposed to be 
amused every year when someone else refers to 
its members as "immortals," and if one can not 
annually make the same remark about people who 
take themselves too seriously, one must at least 
seem to take pleasure in hearing it. People proud 
of their sense of humor insist in precisely the 
same words each year that there is something 
funny about it, and if there is any falling off in 
the vivacity of your annual assent, they snub you. 

Newspaper reporters attend each meeting of 
the Corporation of Letters in the hope that this 
time the members will appear in togas with bay 
leaves in their hair, or at least in court dress 
carrying swords. And although nothing of a 
broadly comic nature has ever occurred, the out- 
ward effect of this infant, and, to my mind, in- 
nocent institution, is still to set people to winking 
at one another once a year, without a word of 
explanation as to why they wink. 

To be sure, you do hear comments from time to 
time on the taste shown by the Corporation in the 
selection of its members, but they are not es- 
pecially significant. People are too familiar with 
the casualties of club membership to think that 
any group of men can add to their number reason- 
ably. Strange creatures sift into any club. The 



122 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

best of committees on admissions can no more ex- 
clude them altogether than the best of housekeep- 
ers can exclude house flies. There is always a 
certain number of club members who have bred 
from eggs laid in the walls or under the carpets; 
it is impossible that any one should have let them 
in on purpose. 

Principles, standards, and the intelligence of the 
persons who make the choice, are no safeguards 
in this perilous domain. Had the nine muses been 
obliged, in committee, to nominate a tenth, luck 
would have had it that she s'hould turn out an 
idiot. No reasonable person can blame the Cor- 
poration for a certain proportion of mishaps in 
membership. 

As to the true source of this undercurrent of 
hostility, I can only make a guess. I should say 
that it springs from the feeling that the Corpora- 
tion is itself a mistake, rather than that it some- 
times makes one. The critics seem to think that 
any such institution in an English-speaking com- 
munity would be likely to be made up of merely 
leading citizens, and they feel that from the point 
of view of everything essential to letters leading 
citizens are as a rule injurious. They believe it 
would always encourage what is respectable and 
never by any chance encourage what is more than 
respectable, and that respectability in letters is too 
much encouraged as it is. They think that when 



INCORPORATED TASTE 123 

art or literature achieves anything permanently 
desirable it is something that no committee of suc- 
cessful American citizens would have antecedently 
recommended or would be likely to discover after- 
wards inside of two generations from the date of 
its occurrence. To the chaos of public taste they 
believe it contributes only an element of pomposity 
leaving the chaos just where it was. In short, they 
loathe institutionalism in taste, having a horror 
not of standards, but of any corporation that 
would tell them what they are. 

I may not do justice to this point of view be- 
cause it is not one with which I sympathize, but 
I should imagine that the argument of its uphold- 
ers would run about like this: There are two 
classes of literary and artistic workers : the trans- 
muters and the transmitters. The transmuters 
are those whose minds leave an impression on 
what passes through them. They survive by a 
force that is elemental and beyond analysis, and 
often unpleasant to the most eminent of their con- 
temporaries. They could no more be a poet 
laureate than could Shelley. They could no more 
get into an academy than could Flaubert. By 
eminent, shining, contemporary civic bodies they 
are usually left aside. An academy is an institu- 
tion for honoring the people who could get along 
without it. An academy is always rich in members 
of the other type ; that is to say, the transmitters. 



124 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

These are the men who leave all things, both in 
art and in literature, precisely where they find 
them. They are of immediate social value for 
purposes of repetition. They are the active, in- 
dustrious, socially blameless individuals, who write 
most of the books that are sold, hold most of 
the good positions, are the soonest known, and 
the soonest forgotten, being wholly of the sub- 
stance of their hour and their place, and the ma- 
jority in every institution. 

In society these people may be useful as a bal- 
last; in art they are always a dead weight. Band 
them together and you add one more to the al- 
ready too large number of organizations for the 
suppression of human diversity. Suppose, they 
say, an academy had existed at the middle of the 
last century. By the time Longfellow was receiv- 
ing more encouragement than he deserved it would 
have encouraged him still more. On the other 
hand, it would have discouraged Poe either nega- 
tively or positively. Very likely there would have 
been a fine row with Poe, and another sore spot 
carried to the grave by that unhappy mortal. 
Take it all in all, an academy organized for the 
deliberate purpose of discouraging all that a ma- 
jority of its members most approved in con- 
temporary literature would probably work out just 
as well as, or better than, the other kind. A 
learned body actuated by malevolence towards 



INCORPORATED TASTE 125 

literature has never been tried. Perhaps it might 
accomplish something. 

All of which seems rather high-flown and in- 
consistent with the probable attitude of these 
critics in their daily lives. They are probably 
themselves members of some humdrum institution 
and are not worried lest it crush out brilliant 
eccentricity. Such a body has to do with letters, 
not as a divine calling, but as a profession w'herein 
men earn their bread. It has to do> with levels, 
and is not to blame for guessing wrong on peaks. 
People do not blame a university for withholding 
the degree of bachelor of arts from anybody but 
a prophet. University decisions are as a rule 
stupid, and universities muddle along on the whole 
usefully. A group of authors is of course a de- 
pressing sight, authors being too much alike as it 
is, but a grouping of authors is no more likely to 
snuff out a genius than a genius is to snuff out the 
group. It is moreover so analogous to other com- 
binations that if a man set out to attack it, he 
would be involved in too vast a crusade. If one 
obeyed an impulse altogether artistic, one would 
go up and down the land pillaging. 



BARBARIANS AND THE CRITIC 

As I remember it, at the Athenian Club that 
evening there had been a meeting of our Com- 
mittee on House Management in which the ques- 
tion of buying awnings for the north windows 
was debated from nine o'clock till half-past ten, 
when it was unanimously referred to a sub-com- 
mittee without power consisting of the chairman, 
the treasurer and the secretary, who were to make 
recommendations at the next meeting. 

Then came supper and after that Mr. Harbing- 
ton Dish read a paper on American verse reform 
in which, while deprecating the radical views of 
certain writers, he insisted fhat tlhe situation was 
very serious and that something ought to be done. 
I recall only two of his suggestions: First, that 
rhymes if retained at all in the new era that was 
now upon us should always be at the beginning 
and never at the end of the line ; and, second, that 
the verse form once popular under the Anglo- 
Saxon Heptarchy ought to be revived. There was 
much applause, but after it the meeting broke up 
rather suddenly, the members slipping away so 
quietly that Jarman and I who were seated in the 

126 



BARBARIANS AND THE CRITICS 127 

two big armchairs by the fire did not realize at 
first that we were alone. 

"It's the worst thing he ever wrote," Jarman 
was saying about a writer of our acquaintance, 
"and it's by all odds the most successful — and not 
merely in sales, either. You should see his letters, 
from people really distinguished, people you'd 
never suppose would be taken in by it. And all 
that talk about his vision, keen social criticism, 
sense of the underlying forces of modern life, 
breadth, depth, audacity ! Why the whole thing's 
nothing but a compilation of the ideas in the air, 
without a single individual, distinctive, " 

Jarman's feet were on the fender, precisely in 
my line of vision and I remember noticing that he 
wore tan shoes. I closed my eyes for a few mom- 
ents and when I opened them again the shoes had 
changed to a kind of bath-slippers and as I glanced 
up I saw he was now clothed in a thin, white, 
•sleeveless garment of strange cut. 

"Why Jarman, what in the world " said I. 

"Mr. Jarman went out ten minutes ago," said 
the person in white, in a low-pitched voice, and 
at the same time bent forward, revealing a 
swarthy wrinkled face, with prominent curved 
nose, and dark eyes of extraordinary brilliance — 
a man over sixty^five, I should say, lean but vigor- 
ous. 

"May I ask to whom I have the pleasure" — 



1 28i THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

said I, edging my chair to a point from which I 
could reach the fire-tongs if necessary. 

"The man of Aquinum," he said "the Aquinas, 
not that upstart Christian dog, Thomas, I believe 
you call him. What right has that corruptor of 
my own tongue to the name of my own birthplace 
when my claim is prior to his by eleven centuries? 
But that's the justice of you barbarians to an 
honest man of letters. Who was the Aquinas for 
a thousand years before the jargon of the tiresome 
Thomas was ever read by anybody, I'd like to 
know. Just answer me that." 

"I am not acquainted in Aquinum," I said, "and 
I am sorry to say I know nothing about the 
Aquinas family, but perhaps if you mention your 
entire name " 

"Oh, well," said he, "if your modern thoughts 
can travel back any further than last week 
Wednesday, perhaps you will recall one D. Junius 
Juvenalis." 

"Juvenal?" said I. "Why, yes; it was you, 
wasn't it, who said children should be treated 
with the greatest reverence and then wrote a lot 
of things that had to be cut out of every edition 
that was likely to fall into the hands of young 
people. Oh, and let me see, there was Dr. John- 
son's poem London and the one on Vanity, and 
"Slow rises worth by poverty oppressed" and that 
sort of thing. You're in the dictionaries of 



BARBARIANS AND THE CRITICS 129 

familiar quotations — nearly half a page. I always 
get you mixed up with Oliver Goldsmith, I don't 
know why; but I believe people generally do get 
you mixed up with somebody else. If you will 
pardon my saying so, I think the prevailing im- 
pression of you at present is rather indistinct, 
and still fading perhaps, especially here — the war, 
you know, and electricity, aviation, submarines, 
motion pictures, breathless progress of the social 
sciences, new education, new woman, new poetry, 
the referendum and recall, world federation, 
eugenics, the rights of labor, and the democratic 
push. It seems rather an unfortunate time to 
choose for spending your — your outing, if I may 
call it that. I should have supposed that Oxford 
in 1760, say, would have been about the latest 
occasion. In short you will find us, I fear, a 

little distrait, forgetful " 

"Be quiet for a little while, barbarian, and I 
will try to explain. It is precisely because I am not 
forgotten that I am here. My name, of course, is 
seldom mentioned and I have not heard for fifty 
years a correct quotation of any of my words, 
but my thoughts go on among you. They go on 
damnably. It is not for the pleasure of meeting 
them that I am come. Quite the contrary. I am 
sent back here in punishment like other poets that 
have sinned. Race hatred was my undoing. I 
called it my Roman patriotism, and I cursed those 



13Q THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

absurd Hebrews and the 'esurient Greekling' and 
those outlandish Egyptians and sneered at the 
Gauls and railed at all those ill-bred Eastern fel- 
lows that overran the town, and I felt quite virtu- 
ous in doing so. And for helping to perpetuate 
the great race lie and the geographical inhumani- 
ties which are still your curse, I am damned to 
revisit my own thoughts as they float about in the 
world through the ages, the same old thoughts, 
dressed up in barbarous foolish phrases, passed 
from one silly mouth to another, turned into tink- 
ling rhymes by the worst series, of imitators that 
ever a man had — 

Let observation with extensive view 
Survey mankind from China to Peru. 

Great poetry, that! That man Johnson had no 
word-sense. I never said anything of the sort. 
What I said was 

Omnibus in terris quae sunt a Gadibus — " 

"Wait a minute," said I, "I don't quite — " 
"Well, what I said didn't sound in the least like 
his pedantic, mincing, repetitious stuff, or Dry- 
den's either for that matter, or Chapman's or that 
series of Oxford dons. Why can't they let me 
alone? That's the curse of my thoughts. They 
are never forgotten. Not a day passes without 
some one's spinning them out in a literary essay 



BARBARIANS AND THE CRITICS 131 

for a magazine all about the discerning few and 
the undiscerning rabble or in tedious conversation 
at some club, like yours. Take, for instance, the 
talk of your critical friend, Jarmanus, what's his 
name, about the mean rewards of merit and the 
triumph of mediocrity. You'll find the whole of 
it in Sat. VII, line 9 to 99 — 

Qui nihil expositum soleat deducere, nee qui 
Communi feriat — " 

"Yes, yes," I interrupted, "but please don't talk 
Yiddish or whatever it is. I am a modern New 
York man and I agree with our most progressive 
educators that any classic sentiment which cannot 
be adequately expressed in the English language 
is not worth reading. You were saying?" 

"I was merely repeating something I said about 
the best selling fiction of my day. I thought I 
had put it rather better and more compactly than 
your Mr. Jarman did or that man in the Atlantic 
Monthly a while ago who spread four sentences 
of mine over eight pages, -or any of the fifteen 
others within the last six months. Is there ever 
a moment when commercialism is not being 
lamented by your cultured critic of the day, who 
in a literary sense is no wise distinguishable from 
your cultured critic of the day before? Writing 
on this theme, they are as like as the white sow's 
litter, and I have to read them all. By the Great 
Girl's bow and quiver, by the salsipotent fork, by 



132 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

the javelin of the Wise Lady, by the Cirrhaean 
spikes, by the boiled head of my own baby served 
in Egyptian vinegar, I curse the whole insanable 
cacoethical cohort of scriptitating " 

"Hold on! What — what's the matter?" 

"I. was just thinking that I should have to read 
in the next number of the Edinburgh Review or 
the Nineteenth Century the self-same things, only 
ill expressed, that I said to Umbricius at the 
Capene arch that evening in the summer, I think, 
of 120, when he was moving his furniture out of 
town. Queer that I who wrote Occidit miseros 
crambe repetita " 

"There you go again." 

"I say it's queer that I of all people should be 
condemned throughout all time to stuff myself 
with the warmed-over cabbage of my own com- 
monplace. I didn't mind coming back for Shake- 
speare when he stole that thing about 'Imperial 
Caesar, dead and turned to clay,' but I haven't 
had an afternoon in Hades since Matthew Arnold 
wrote about Philistines, and nowadays with every 
dull person writing about the money-god there is 
no rest. Why, once when I 'hoped to pass the 
week-end in Hell I was called back to read Mr. 
Upton Sinclair on the sin of paying a thousand 
dollars for a toothbrush — a matter which I had 
settled finally in Sed plures nimia congesta " 

"Please don't do that." 



BARBARIANS AND THE CRITICS 133 

"And what with the constant reappearance of 
my ideas on mothers-in-law, the newly rich, suc- 
cess, waste, s'how, luxury, gambling, graft, the 
social climber, divorce, woman from the point of 
view of the anti-suffragist, woman as the target 
for brightly cynical remarks, alcoholism, prosti- 
tution, country life, subsidization of authors, high 
cost of living and forty other burning modern 
questions, it looks as if I should never — . And 
the hideous uniformity of your vapid writers in 
their common delineation of our thoughts; the 
large wastes of identical language. Forty novels 
in a row with the thoughts all dating from the 
reign of Domitian and all expressed alike. Belles- 
lettres produced by machinery. But though the 
monotony of the modern manner is terrible, that 
is not the worst of it. What I can't stand is the 
stench — " 

"Stench?" I asked. 

"Smell of decaying reputations. Nothing worse 
to a fairly immortal nose than the smell of a pass- 
ing modern reputation. Impossible to stay within 
a mile of your national capital, and the literary 
people are almost as bad. I tried to drop in on 
a group of Imagist poets on my way here just 
now, but I nearly fainted." 

"I hope," said I, drawing my chair away, "I 
haven't been too — " 

"Oh, no, not you. That's why I chose you in- 



134 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

stead of a celebrity. People without any reputa- 
tion to decay are comparatively odorless." 

At that moment the room turned upside down 
and spilled him out of it and I was tossing about 
in space till I heard Jarman say, "I've been shak- 
ing you for fully five minutes. If you want to 
catch the i 32, you'll have to hurry." 



REVIEWER'S CRAMP 

One would think that the most dogged of fire- 
side defenders would be satisfied with the moral 
purport of a novel that I read some years ago. 
Nearly all the characters in it who offend against 
the marriage bond — and there are quite a lot of 
them — come to a bad end. In fact, in the interest 
of literary variety it would seem that sudden 
death, delirium, blasted hopes, social perdition, 
and the wages of sin in one form or another were 
distributed with an almost too perfect moral pre- 
cision. From the birth of the first illegitimate 
infant in an early chapter down to the moment 
in the final pages when the last illicit lover has 
his skull crushed in, the mills of God are made 
to grind in a manner that ought seriously to dis- 
courage the carnally minded. Yet instantly there 
were many commentators who denounced the book 
as dissolute. 

One of them said he was shocked by the "de- 
liberate devotion of such a pen as the author's to 
the defiance of the social conventions and ideas 
of duty and morality." Another wanted to know 
how "parents and guardians can prevent young 
people from reading such horrid low class tales." 

135 



i3<S THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

They called it "dangerous" and "depraved." 
They said that the author had set out malevolently 
to "undermine all respect for marriage and par- 
enthood." 

Why reviewers pick out certain books as dang- 
erous is one of the mysteries of literary journalism. 
You can no more tell what will frighten reviewers 
than what a horse will shy at. A reviewer will 
pass the same familiar object twenty times and 
then of a sudden rear at the sight of it as in the 
presence of a monster never before beheld. If 
one could gather all the books and plays de- 
nounced as dangerous in the last twenty years, 
what a splendid object lesson it would be in the 
inutility of moral apprehension. Even so sensitive 
a moral being as a New York City politician prob- 
ably would not seek to suppress to-day another 
"Mrs. Warren's Profession." 

Reviewers are of course aware of this when 
they stop to think of it. Every reviewer really 
knew that all the ideas, situations, and emotions 
presented in that novel had been thumbed and 
dog-eared in nearly every circulating library for 
a generation. For as a matter of fact it was 
about the most conventional book that the author 
had ever written and it seemed almost a compila- 
tion from the fiction of our time. The homes 
that it could undermine must all have been long 
since blasted. 



REVIEWER'S CRAMP 137 

Perhaps it is due to temporary loss of memory, 
whereby one modern novel suddenly looms up to 
the reviewer's mind, alone and terrible, devoid of 
relation to any other modern novel in the world. 
Perhaps if you had forgotten completely what a 
modern novelist was like, the sight of one would 
be shocking. Even Mr. Harold McChamber 
might seem peculiar if encountered by a mind en- 
tirely blank. Or it may be that certain reviewers 
are constrained at intervals to utter moral noises 
without regard to the occasion, just as a watch- 
dog will sometimes bark at a wheelbarrow, not 
because there is danger in the wheel-barrow, but 
because there is bark in the dog. Perhaps the re 
viewers above quoted could not have held in at 
that moment no matter what novelist had passed 
by and it happened to be this one. Neither he nor 
they were really to blame for it. They fidgetted 
merely because they felt fidgety and long months 
followed in which, with Arnold Bennett up to 
something passionate, H. G. Wells at his wicked- 
est, Bernard Shaw in eruption, new bad words 
coming out in each installment of the Oxford 
Dictionary, and the air thick with volumes of the 
most terribly lucid sexual explanations, they faced 
equally grave moral perils with entire composure. 
Then just as you were dozing off over some quite 
ordinary bedside compound of matrimonial mis- 
calculations and rebellious hearts, they would ring 



i38t THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

out the wild alarm again — seized by the same old 
unaccountable spasm over the duality of the two 
sexes, and the usualness of the usual novel, and 
and the contemporaneousness of their contempo* 
raries. 

I believe, however, I can offer a better explana- 
tion based on my personal experience as a re- 
viewer. Such seizures as the one above men- 
tioned and they often take widely different forms, 
are the result, I think, of reviewer's cramp. 

At all events I myself, after reviewing books 
for five years, was obliged to desist on account 
of reviewer's cramp. I may say for the enlight- 
enment of those who are not familiar with the 
malady that it is purely mental, having none of 
the physical symptoms of the nervous affection 
which sometimes jerks a writer's pen-hand in 
the air. My hand was not jerked in the air, 
but my mind was, and from that time to this 
I have never started to write a review that my 
mind did not immediately fly away from it and 
rivet itself on something else ; and when detached 
with difficulty from that particular object it would 
rivet itself on another, equally remote from the re- 
view. It is no mere lack of interest in writing a 
review, for that might be overcome— is overcome 
daily and hourly — and besides you see reviews 
being written everywhere by people who obviously 
could have had no interest in writing them. It 



REVIEWER'S CRAMP 139 

is the passionate interest in something else that 
constitutes the gravity of my case — the more so 
because the things that then awaken it do not 
normally attract me. I have been enchanted for 
a long time by an ordinary penwiper from the 
moment of starting to write a review. When a 
bee has entered the room, although I am not in 
the least entomological in my inclinations, I have 
become a Fabre. 

Recently I gave the thing one more trial, think- 
ing that after a long interval the condition might 
have passed. I took five novels that had enter- 
tained me and determined to stir them all together 
in four or five pleasant pages round the central 
notion that, after all, each showed in one way or 
another the tendency of the contemporary novel 
to be contemporary, in spite of the fact that from 
the pages of one you would not know that the war 
had existed and from the pages of another you 
would see plainly that but for the war the book 
would not exist. I should express surprise at a 
writer who showed no traces of the war, but I 
should admit that he was nevertheless contempo- 
rary. I read dozens of those articles every month; 
I like them; and I started to make one. This 
time it was sealing-wax. I rolled six balls of 
sealing-wax, making them rounder and rounder. 
It is wonderful how round you can make balls of 
sealing-wax, if you give your whole soul to it. 



140 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

Most reviewers sooner or later have some 
form of reviewer's cramp, but the victim of my 
form of it is not only permanently disabled; he 
is under the illusion of righteousness. He be- 
lieves he is justified in behaving in that way. Not 
only that, but he believes other reviewers ought 
to behave as he does. I felt nobler after rolling 
those wax balls than I should have felt after writ- 
ing the review, and so far as I have read the re- 
views of those novels, I believe almost every 
writer if he had applied himself to sealing-wax 
instead would be feeling nobler too. For I can- 
not believe that they meant a word they said or 
that they wanted to say it — I mean in regard to 
the quality of the books, not of course their mere 
outlines of the stories. 

I cannot believe, for example, that a man per- 
haps fifty years of age and a reviewer of novels 
by the hundred can become ecstatic often. I be- 
lieve he will go a whole year at his occupation 
without being ecstatic once. I do not believe that 
after reading Miss Fanny Wilson's Apple Blos- 
soms, he meant any one of the following words: 
"From her seasoned but joyous throat the old 
melody ripples forth fresh and free, full of 
delicious whims and sly laughter, reminiscent of 
the Vie de BohemeP I insist also that those five 
reviewers, each of whom implied that on reading 
the The Torment he was shaken like a reed by the 



REVIEWER'S CRAMP 141 

wind knew perfectly well either that he was not 
shaking at all or that he was making himself 
shake. 

Nothing stood out from the general situation 
as they implied that it did in all of these reviews. 
In short, these reviewers were subdued to the iron 
law of reviewing, and this iron law ordains that 
reviewing shall be the perpetual announcement of 
differences that are not perceived and of astonish- 
ments for good or for evil that are not experi- 
enced, and that it shall be accompanied by a con- 
strained silence as to the sense of monotony that 
undoubtedly always pervades the reviewer's 
bosom. There is stiff compulsion in it. Such 
things could not happen in a free and private life. 

If, for example, a man in private life had for 
one day a puree of beans, and the next day hari- 
cots verts, and then in daily succession bean soup, 
bean salad, butter beans, lima, black, navy, Bos- 
ton baked, and kidney beans, and then back to 
puree and all over again, he would not be in the 
relation of the general eater to food or in the 
relation of the general reader to books. But he 
would be in the relation of the general reviewer 
toward novels. He would soon perceive that the 
relation was neither normal nor desirable, and he 
would take measures, violent if need be, to change 
it. He would not say of the haricots verts when 
they came round again that they were quite in 



1421 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

the vein of the Vie de Boheme but ever fresh and 
free, and he would not say on his navy bean day 
that they were as brisk and stirring little beans of 
the sea as he could recall in his recent eating. He 
would say grimly, Beans again, and he would take 
prompt steps to intermit this abominable preces- 
sion of bean dishes, however diversely they were 
contrived. 

If change for any reason were impossible — if 
owing to a tyrant wife and the presence of a 
monomaniac in the kitchen we could imagine him 
constrained to an indefinite continuance, — then he 
would either conceive a personal hatred toward 
all beans that would make him unjust to any bean 
however meritorious, or he would acquire a mad 
indiscriminateness of acquiescence and any bean 
might please. And his judgment would be in 
either case an unsafe guide for general eaters. 

This I believe is what happens to almost all 
reviewers of fiction after a certain time, and it 
accounts satisfactorily for various phenomena 
that are often attributed to a baser cause. It is 
the custom at certain intervals to denounce review- 
ers for their motives. They are called venal and 
they are called cowardly by turns. They are 
blamed for having low standards or no standards 
at all and for not having the slightest sense of 
anything of a permanent value in literature, and 
for using the language of the advertising page. 



REVIEWER'S CRAMP 143 

I think their defects are due chiefly to the nature 
of their calling; that they suffer from an occupa- 
tional disease. 

I do not see why they should be blamed for 
not applying to their contemporaries a scale based 
on the permanent values of literature. They are 
not engaged in an occupation that admits of such 
a thing. No one in their situation could judge 
fairly his contemporaries, even if it be assumed 
that contemporaries can ever be fairly judged. 
They are wedged in so tight with contemporary 
minds that they cannot even get a square look at 
them. But they persist in employing words that 
imply a permanent value in some merely momen- 
tary thing and they mislead a general reader, 
who, as he is not devouring current fiction in such 
quantities as they are, has more space in his 
thoughts for perspective. Hence they always 
seem in any proportionate view of the thing 
profuse and niggardly by turns — arms out to-day 
to a Mr. Merrick or a Mr. Walpole, backs turned 
perhaps to-morrow on some poor American, just 
as good as they, who is naturally thinking, How 
about me ? They are to blame rather for misusing 
the words of literary criticism. In the circum- 
stances they should not be used at all. It is a 
journalistic subject and requires a journalistic 
treatment, but there is such a fidgetting with liter- 
ary terms that somehow they always mislead you. 



i 4 4 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

It is not speaking ill of fiction of this class to 
call it merely journalism, as. critics for a genera- 
tion past have been doing; it is speaking well of 
journalism. It has a wider liberty than other 
kinds of journalism and a somewhat longer hold, 
but it does not last long and what is more, the 
makers of it do not expect it to last long. Essen- 
tially it is on the exact level of dozens of respect- 
able periodicals, as everybody concerned in it or 
about it is aware. Yet reviewers who never speak 
of the appearance of the last month's magazines 
with any literary emotion, will report almost any 
novel as a literary event, or condemn it because 
it is not one. It seems as if they might avoid 
extremes in the one case as well as in the other. 
Surely this situation has lasted long enough for 
familiarity to supervene. If I saw a man while 
reading the London Spectator fall from his chair 
in a fit of laughter, if I saw some elderly gentle- 
man throw the Atlantic Monthly up in the air with 
shouts of joy, I should suppose of course that 
each of them was out of his mind. When review- 
ers of fiction behave as they constantly do in this 
same manner over events that are no whit more 
significant, it is not necessary, perhaps, to take so 
serious a view of their condition of mind; but it 
is natural to suppose that they are the unconscious 
victims of the malady that I have described. 



HOW TO HATE SHAKESPEARE 

When I read M. Georges Pellissier's book on 
Shakespeare some years ago I could not see why- 
he should have lashed himself to Shakespeare in 
that hostile intimacy. Probably no other English 
poet could have been found, except perhaps 
Browning, who would so essentially offend his 
modern, Gallic intelligence, and one would think 
M. Pellissier, after yawning through a half- 
dozen of the plays, would have smiled or cursed 
according as his impulse prompted, and thrown 
the rest of them away. Instead of that he 
dragged his incompatible mind not only through 
the whole length of Shakespeare's dramas, but 
over a large area of the dullest Shakespearean 
criticism as well. It seemed heroic but singularly 
unnecessary. It was as if, on meeting a woman 
whom he particularly disliked, he had straightway 
married her and then taken notes for the next 
ten years in corroboration of his disagreeable first 
impressions. Never was a man more diligent in 
the accumulation of ennui. He turned the plays 
inside out for evil instances and he gathered them 

145 



146I THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

in awful heaps — bad puns, platitudes, pleonasms, 
contradictions, incoherencies, bombast, mixed 
metaphors, and bungled plots — in short, every 
fault of style, structure, character analysis or 
moral teaching that a life-long, conscientious 
hater of the bard could lay his hands on — and as 
they were all rendered in perfectly commonplace 
modern French, they presented a sorry spectacle. 
It was as honest and thorough a job in damnation 
as had been done in many a year, and for that 
reason very interesting. Any one who really 
hated a poet could find there an admirable illustra- 
tion of the way to go about it. 

First of all there were the outrageous liberties 
which Shakespeare takes with the sacred unities 
of time and place and action. M. Pellissier pro- 
fessed to be more liberal than Aristotle in that 
matter, but his nerves went all to pieces amidst 
the riotings of Shakespeare. Why, there are 
seven changes of place in the second act of "The 
Two Gentlemen of Verona," and six in the first 
act of "Coriolanus," and thirteen in the third act 
of "Antony and Cleopatra," ranging over three 
continents, all that was then known of the surface 
of the globe ! And as to time, in some plays the 
action is supposed to run for years, which is 
manifestly incredible, while in others it is tele- 
scoped into so tight a compass that villainy has 
no chance to germinate or passion to expand. 



HOW TO HATE SHAKESPEARE 147 

How is a character to develop in three hours? 
How could the events of "Measure for Measure" 
squeeze themselves into a week? Fancy M. 
Hervieu doing such a thing, or Donnay, Mirbeau, 
Brieux, Capus, or even Rostand. Macbeth could 
not have become so ambitious as he was in four 
days, or Othello so jealous. In "The Tempest" 
Prospero puts Ferdinand to the trial by making 
him carry logs and finally releases him and re- 
wards him with the hand of Miranda in these 
words : 

All thy vexations 
Were but my trials of thy love, and thou 
Hast strangely stood the test. . . . 
Then, as my gift, and thine own acquisition 
Worthily purchased, take my daughter — 

But says M. Pellissier, watch in hand, how long 
has Ferdinand actually been at this log business ? 
He did not lift a single log till after the close of 
the first act, and he left off logging immediately 
before the beginning of the fourth. Thus his 
logging activities could have lasted no more than 
a single hour ! Considering what the Charity Or- 
ganization demands of a tramp in return for a 
night's lodging, Ferdinand was grossly overpaid. 

Although he found the logs very heavy, would an hour 
of that work suffice, as his father-in-law said, for the 
"worthy purchase" of Miranda? 



1481 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

The matter seemed all the more unpardonable 
when Prospero's lines were rendered in such 
words as these — 

Les tourments que je t'ai infliges devaient eprouver ton 
amour; tu les as merveilleusement supportes, etc. 

On the other hand, the action of the "Winter's 
Tale" skips sixteen years and the figure of Time 
appears on the stage and "without any scruple" 
tells the audience what has happened. Yet in this 
very play Shakespeare rushes the King into a 
jealous fit more suddenly than M. Pellissier has 
ever seen a jealous fit come on. 

Then many of the plays tell several stories at 
once. "Cymbeline" tells three, and so does "The 
Taming of the Shrew;" "King Lear" tells not 
only the tale of the old King betrayed by his 
daughters, but that of Gloucester betrayed by his 
son; "Timon of Athens" breaks off when it is 
about half-way through, and takes Alcibiades for 
its new hero; "The Merchant of Venice" spins 
two yarns which essentially have nothing in 
common. 

So M. Pellissier ran on, with mounting indig- 
nation. 

And in "The Merchant of Venice" Shakespeare 
does not even respect the rules of simple arithme- 
tic, for when Jessica tells Portia that she has over- 
heard Shylock say that he loves the pound of 



HOW TO HATE SHAKESPEARE 149 

Antonio's flesh more than twenty times three thou- 
sand ducats, Portia offers at first to pay him six 
thousand ducats, and later says she will double 
it if necessary and even triple that result. But 
says Pellissier, this is by no means the right 
amount. "Twenty times the sum due is sixty thou- 
sand ducats, and 6,000x2x3, is only thirty-six 
thousand, a little more than half." He finds 
"The Merchant of Venice," indeed, very objec- 
tionable from almost every point of view: Its 
moral teachings are bad, as when Bassanio wins 
Portia's hand in the casket test, though he de- 
served no better than either of the other suitors; 
it tells two stories instead of one; and above all 
it drags along through an utterly worthless fifth 
act, when a few words added to the fourth would 
have supplied all that was necessary. The fact 
that this same worthless fifth act contains some of 
the finest and most familiar lines in all Shakes- 
peare's writings does not concern him, if indeed 
he ever observed it. Punctuality, not poetry, is 
the thing. 

He is shocked by the shameful waste of time 
on light characters and hates all those non-essen- 
tial clowns, court fools, pedants, drunkards, 
thieves, eccentrics. What is the use of Dogberry 
and Verges? We find them first giving their tire- 
some instructions to their men; again, when they 
make their report to the governor, who is naturally 



i5o THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

much irritated by their sottise; again, in prison, 
questioning the accused; again before the gover- 
nor; and once more after that. Even if these 
"two stupid police officers" were as amusing as 
Shakespeare probably thought them, they would 
still be absolutely useless ; but as a matter of fact 
they are dull buffoons fit only for a vulgar street 
show. And what a waste of time are the fooleries 
of Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Touch- 
stone, Lancelot Gobbo, Speed, Lance, Bottom, the 
Dromios, Poor Tom, the grave-diggers and play- 
ers in "Hamlet," Mercutio, Trinculo, Stephano, 
and the rest. Like Mr. Bernard Shaw, he has an 
especial aversion for the melancholy Jaques — 

Jaques. I'll give you a verse to this note, that I made 
yesterday in despite of my invention. 
Amiens. And I'll sing it. 
Jaques. Thus it goes: 

If it do come to pass 
That any man turn ass, 
Leaving his wealth and ease 
A stubborn will to please. 

Ducdame, ducdame, ducdame. 

Here shall he see 

Gross fools as he, 

And if he will come to me. 

Amiens. What's that "Ducdame"? 



HOW TO HATE SHAKESPEARE 1 5 1 

Jaques. 'Tis a Greek invocation to call fools into a 
circle. I'll go sleep if I can; if I cannot, I'll rail against 
all the first-born of Egypt. 

What philosophy is there in this? asks M. 
Pellissier. 

From these citations I think it will be plain to 
anyone who at any period of his life has found 
pleasure in reading Shakespeare that M. Pellissier 
has by an accident of birth been for ever debarred 
from sharing in it. Therein he resembles the 
Shakespeare commentators. To him, as to the 
commentator, Shakespeare is not a source of pleas- 
ure, but a task. Among us common, careless folk, 
Shakespeare is not necessarily a sad matter, but 
on the strange assiduous tribe who live in foot- 
notes he has laid a cruel burden. Nothing can 
persuade a layman that the Shakespeare scholars 
are not men who privately loathe Shakespeare. 
Otherwise, why their amazing marginal irrele- 
vancies ? 

Act I., Sc. II., Line 20, Note 56. "Biting." Often 
used metaphorically by Shakespeare. So of "nipping." 
Cf. "a nipping and an eager air." 

They write their notes, like schoolboys marking 
up their text-books' margins. In Shakespeare's 
company and longing for escape, they pass the 
time in queer, superfluous labors, memory exploits, 



1 5 % THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

and verbal divagations, sometimes quoting all the 
passages that resemble a little the one in hand, 
sometimes all the lines they can think of that do 
not at all resemble it, not knowing what to do, yet 
bound to seem busy, hence elucidating, collating, 
emending, bickering with some other commentator 
fifty years dead, expounding prepositions, ex- 
pounding anything, merely to relieve the awful 
tedium of being alone with Shakespeare. Hating 
poetry, they collect adverbs, or explain discrep- 
ancies in the time of day, or quote the moral re- 
flections of some tired predecessor. I have seen 
a sentiment from Dr. Johnson which no free-born 
Anglo-American reader would remember for five 
minutes hoarded by these forlorn sub-Shakes- 
pearean Crustacea for five generations. And they 
are under no compulsion. That is what puzzles 
every care-free person — why this especially un- 
sympathetic class of men should have ever gone 
into the business at all, when there are chess, 
stamp-collecting, autographs, numismatics, golf, 
peace movements, book-plates, gardening, pressed 
flowers, social welfare work, taxidermy, solitaire 
— so many perfectly respectable occupations, at a 
safe distance from the hated bard. 

And the best thing in M. Pellissier's book is 
the vengeance it takes on them. The same sort 
of reasons that they have hypocritically presented 
for a hundred years as ground for loving Shakes- 



HOW TO HATE SHAKESPEARE 153 

peare are here presented with greater force as 
ground for hating him. So he strips the mask 
from the other unimaginative scholars who pre- 
ceded him and reveals their sullen faces. 



CONFESSIONS OF A GALLOMANIAC 

I have no idea what Mr. George Moore meant 
by saying in one of his literary discussions that 
Americans write better than Englishmen because 
they are safer from French influence. It seems 
quite obvious to me that Americans write worse 
than Englishmen, and that one of the reasons for 
it is that they are under English influence. Per- 
haps if they went by way of France there might 
be a chance of their escape from the prolonged 
colonialism of American letters and there would 
at least be the benefit of variety. Our writers are 
a timid people, like the conies, and in all prob- 
ability they would still be imitating something but 
they would at least be imitating something further 
off. I could pick out twelve rather important 
American novelists on whom the experiment could 
have been tried without the least danger to current 
literature. And take the case of Mr. George 
Moore himself. Having but little power of self- 
analysis he would probably not know what had 
been best for him, but even he would hardly wish 
to have escaped his French experience. He is 
better, not worse, for his resemblance to Flaubert. 

154 



A GALLOMANIAC 155 

Not to imply that he has taken Flaubert as a 
model; I do not even know whether he has given 
him a thought; but his style in English is the pre- 
cise equivalent of Flaubert's — delicate, flexible, in- 
evitable. One may not like what Mr. George 
Moore says but one cannot easily imagine, espe- 
cially in his earlier novels, that there could be any 
other way of saying it. That, I believe, is a 
French and not an English characteristic. 

However, I am not concerned here with the train- 
ing of Mr. George Moore or with the redemp- 
tion of American novelists, but with my own small 
affairs. How to expose myself sufficiently to that 
same French influence which he considered so 
disastrous to the English language had been my 
problem during the entire period of the war. 
Down to the outbreak of the war I had no 
more desire to converse with a Frenchman in 
his own language than with a modern Greek. 
I thought I understood French well enough 
for my own purposes, because I had read it off and 
on for twenty years, but when the war aroused 
sympathies and sharpened curiosities that I had 
not felt before, I realized the width of the chasm 
that cut me off from what I wished to feel. Nor 
could it be bridged by any of the academic, natural, 
or commercial methods that I knew of. They were 
were either too slow or they led in directions that 
I did not wish to go. I had not the slightest de- 



1 5 & THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

sire to call taxis, buy tickets, check trunks and 
board sleeping-cars all through Europe, since I 
doubted if I should go there. Neither did I wish 
to draw elaborate comparisons at some boarding- 
house table between Central Park and the Bois de 
Boulogne. I tried a phonograph, and after many 
bouts with it I acquired part of a sermon by Bos- 
suet and real fluency in discussing a quinsy sore 
throat with a Paris physician, in case I ever went 
there and had one. I took fourteen conversation 
lessons from Mme. Carnet, and being rather well 
on in years at the start, I should, if I had kept 
on diligently, be able at the age of eighty-five to 
inquire faultlessly my way to the post-office. I 
could already ask for butter and sing a song writ- 
ten by Henry IV — when my teacher went to 
France to take care of her half-brother's children 
by his second wife, their father having been killed 
in the trenches. I will say this for Mme Carnet. 
I came to understand perfectly the French for all 
her personal and family affairs. No human being 
has ever confided in me so abundantly as she did. 
No human being has ever so sternly repressed any 
answering confidences of my own. Her method 
of instruction, if it was one, was that of jealous, 
relentless, unbridled soliloquy. 

Thrown on the world with no power of sustain- 
ing a conversation on any other subject than the 
members of the Carnet family, I nevertheless re- 



A GALLOMANIAC 157 

solved to take no more lessons but to hunt down 
French people and make them talk. What I 
really needed was a governess to take me to and 
from my office and into the park at noon, but 
at my age that was out of the question. Then be- 
gan a career of hypocritical benevolence. I 
scraped acquaintance with every Frenchman whom 
I heard talking English very badly, and I became 
immensely interested in his welfare. I formed 
the habit of introducing visiting Frenchmen to 
French-speaking Americans and sitting, with open 
mouth, in the flow of their conversation. Then 
I fell in with M. Bernou, the commissioner who 
was over here buying guns and whose English 
and my French were so much alike that we agreed 
to interchange them. We met daily for two weeks 
and walked for an hour in the park, each tearing 
at the other's language. Our conversations, as I 
look back on them, must have run about like this : 

"It calls to walk," said he, smiling brilliantly. 

"It is good morning," said I, "better than I had ex- 
tended." 

"I was at you yestairday ze morning, but I deed not 
find." 

"I was obliged to leap early," said I, "and I was busy 
standing up straight all around the forenoon." 

"The book I prayed you send, he came, and I thank, 
but positively are you not deranged?" 

"Don't talk," said I. "Never talk again. It was 



1581 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

really nothing anywhere. I had been very happy, I re- 
assure." 

"Pardon, I glide, I glode. There was the hide of a 
banane. Did I crash you?" 

"I noticed no insults," I replied. "You merely gnawed 
my arm." 

Gestures and smiles of perfect understanding. 

I do not know whether Bernou, who like myself 
was middle-aged, felt as I did on these occasions, 
but by the suppression of every thought that I 
could not express in my childish vocabulary, I 
came to feel exactly like a child. They said I 
ought to think in French and I tried to do so, 
but thinking in French when there is so little 
French to think with, divests the mind of its ac- 
quisitions of forty years. Experience slips away 
for there are not words enough to lay hold of it, 
and the soul is bounded by the present tense. The 
exigencies of the concrete and the immediate were 
so pressing that reflection had no chance. Knowl- 
edge of good and evil did not exist; the sins had 
no names ; and the mind under its linguistic limita- 
tions was like a rather defective toy Noah's ark. 
From the point of view of Bernou's and my vocab- 
ulary, Central Park was as the Garden of Eden 
after six months — new and unnamed things every- 
where. A dog, a tree, a statue, taxed all our 
powers of description, and on a complex matter 
like a policeman our minds could not meet at all. 



A GALLOMANIAC 159 

We could only totter together a few steps in any 
mental direction, but there was a real pleasure in 
this earnest interchange of insipidities and they 
were highly valued on each side. For my part I 
shall always like Bernou, and feel toward him as 
my childhood's friend, and I hope, when we meet 
again, I at sixty, he at fifty-five, we may stand 
together on a bridge and pluck the petals from a 
daisy and count them as they fall into the river, 
he in English, I in French. I wonder if Bernou 
noticed that I was an old, battered man, bothered 
with a tiresome profession. I certainly never sus- 
pected that he was. His language utterly failed 
to give me that impression. 

Why should Seneca say it is an utterly ridiculous 
and disgraceful thing to be an elementary old 
man? Unless a man, as he grows old, gains his 
second simplicity, he is either already dead or 
damned. There is but one right passion for ad- 
vancing years and that is curiosity, and curiosity 
implies the acceptance of one's mental inferiority 
toward an insect, toward a language, toward a 
man. Curiosity is never gratified in conversations 
as I hear them at my club or as I recall them at 
successful dinner-parties, long since mercifully 
gone by. Talk among respectable middle-aged 
New Yorkers is either an alternate pelting with 
opinions or a competitive endeavor to shine. 
When old Foggs, throwing down his newspaper, 



1 60 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

bears down on me with his views on labor unions, 
which I have known for seven years, it is not from 
any wish to talk with me. He regards me as his 
mental pocket-handkerchief. In revenge I blow 
my views of Wilson on him and off he goes. Each 
of us really hates to receive all that the other 
has to give him. After conversing thirty years 
in New York in the English language, I have 
found that, if I am to preserve an interest in my 
species, I must begin again in another tongue. 
One must begin again at something in middle life, 
back in the woods, back on the farm or in the 
garden, or down at the bottom of the French 
language. Otherwise one will fall among those 
dreadful and anachronistic fogies; galvanized 
spectators of sports they cannot share in; trailers 
of youth to whom they are a nuisance ; ever freshly 
Harvard or freshly Yale. Seneca was true to his 
theory of sophistication to the end, and so very 
properly bled himself to death in the bathtub. 

After I lost Bernou I fastened upon an un- 
frocked priest who had come over here and gone 
into the shoe trade, a small, foxy man, who re- 
garded me, I think, in the light of an aggressor. 
He wanted to become completely American and 
forget France, and as I was trying to reverse the 
process, I rather got in his way. He could talk 
of mediaeval liturgies and his present occupation, 
but nothing in between, and as he spoke English 



A GALLOMANIAC 161 

very well, his practical mind revolted at the use 
of a medium of communication in which one of us 
almost strangled when there was another available 
in which we both were at ease. I could not pump 
much French out of him. He would burst into 
English rather resentfully. Then I took to the 
streets at lunch-time and tried newsdealers, book- 
shops, restaurants, invented imaginary errands, 
bought things that I did not want, and exchanged 
them for objects even less desirable. That kept a 
little conversation going day by day, but on the 
whole it was a dry season. It is a strange thing. 
There are more than thirty thousand of them in 
the city of New York, and I had always heard that 
the French are a clannish folk and hate to learn 
another language, but most of my overtures in 
French brought only English upon me. The more 
pains I took the more desirable it seemed to them 
that I should be spared the trouble of continuing. 
I could not explain the situation. I was always 
diving into French and they were always pulling 
me out again. They thought they were humane. 
After all, hunting down French people in the 
city of New York who spoke English worse than 
I spoke French, was as good an exercise as golf, 
and it took less time. One reason why a good 
deal of skill is required is because they hate broken 
French worse than most of us hate broken English. 
Then there is of course that natural instinct to 



1 6a THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

alleviate apparently needless suffering, and my 
object was to stave off rescue as long as possible. 
When dragged out into the light of English I tried 
to talk just as foolishly in order that they might 
think it was not really my French that was the 
matter with me. Sometimes that worked quite 
well. Finding me just as idiotic in my own lan- 
guage they went back to theirs. It certainly 
worked well with my friend M. Barter, a para- 
lytic tobacconist in the West Thirties near the 
river, to whom my relation was for several months 
that of a grandchild, though, I believe we were 
of the same age. He tried to form my character 
by bringing me up on such praiseworthy episodes 
of his early life as he thought I was able to grasp. 

Now at the end of a long year of these persist- 
ent puerilities I am able to report two definite 
results : In the first place a sense of my incapacity 
and ignorance infinitely vaster than when I began, 
and in the second a profound distrust, possibly 
vindictive in its origin, of all Americans in the city 
of New York who profess an acquaintance with 
French culture, including teachers, critics, theater 
audiences, lecture audiences and patronesses of 
visiting Frenchmen. 

It was perhaps true, as people said at the time, 
that a certain French theatrical experiment in New 
York could not continue for the simple reason 
that it was too good a thing for the theatre-going 



A GALLOMANIAC 163 

public to support. It may be that the precise 
equivalent of the enterprise, even if not hampered 
by a foreign language, could not have permanently 
endured. Yet from what I saw of its audiences, 
critics, enthusiasts, and from what I know of the 
American Gallophile generally, including myself, 
I believe the linguistic obstacle to have been more 
serious than they would have us suppose — serious 
enough to account for the situation without drag- 
ging in our aesthetic incapacity. It was certainly 
an obstacle that less than one-half of any audience 
ever succeeded in surmounting. 

I do not mean that the rest of the audience got 
nothing out of it, for so expressive were the play- 
ers by other means than words, that they often 
sketched the play out in pantomime. The physical 
activities of the troupe did not arise, as some of 
the critics declared, from the vivacity of the Gallic 
temperament; nor were they assumed, as others 
believed, because in the seventeenth century French 
actors had been acrobats. - These somewhat ex- 
aggerated gestures were occasioned by the percep- 
tion that the majority of the spectators were be- 
ginners in French. They were supplied by these 
ever-tactful people as a running translation for a 
large body of self-improving Americans. 

But while no doubt almost everybody caught, 
as he would have said, the gist of the thing, though 
not quite understanding all the words, very few, 



i6 4 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

I believe, were in any condition to judge of the 
play as a play. This seemed particularly true 
When reading the published commentaries. The 
players deserved all the eulogies they received, 
but if they could have beheld the inner state of the 
eulogists they would not have felt in the slightest 
degree buoyed up. 

La Fontaine's Enchanted Cup, for example, as 
produced by these players, was admirable, and a 
certain New York play reviewer was entirely justi- 
fied in speaking of it in the highest terms, but the 
fact that he thought the words for an "enchanted 
cup" really meant an "exchanged coupe" detracted 
a little from the value of his testimony. 

This may have been rather an extreme instance 
among the commentators, but there were approxi- 
mations to it on all sides and particularly among 
those people who adored, as they said, the French 
drama, French art, the fine, frank simplicity of 
the French character, and above all the incompar- 
able lucidity of the French language and the in- 
imitable manner that the French have of saying 
things. For though we Gallophiles may some- 
times get a little bit mixed up; though we may 
mistake a bad player for a good one, and prose for 
poetry, and a commonplace for a shining epigram; 
though we may confound a horse-cab with a crystal 
vessel, and humor with obscenity; though, as we 
would say, these nuances may to a certain extent 



A GALLOMANIAC 165 

be lost upon us, it does not follow that our love 
of French things is any less intense, and it cer- 
tainly is no less panegyrical. But it does follow, 
I believe, that at that particular moment we were 
not quite ripe for a serious encounter with the 
French drama when rendered in actual French; 
and its discontinuance was no reflection on our 
artistic taste. We had not reached the stage at 
which artistic taste emerges. We were far away 
from the intimacies of art, battling in the outskirts 
of comprehension. 

"Messieurs et mesdames : During my six weeks' sojourn 
in your wonderful country I have realized that America 
is one thing above all others. It is the land of oppor- 
tunity." — Enthusiastic applause. 

The welcome accorded to certain French lec- 
turers by our great universities, society leaders and 
women's clubs during the war made no unfair 
distinctions. It was not withheld merely because 
the lecturer through no fault of his own, had 
nothing to say; nor was the applause reserved for 
the better portions of his discourse, or even for 
those portions which were intelligible. One of 
the most successful lectures ever delivered before 
a woman's club in New York City was given by a 
Frenchman, who, having taken a severe cold, was 
entirely inaudible from beginning to end. The 
applause was almost continuous. In the warmth 



i661 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

of our ardor for France one Frenchman was as 
good as another, just as after the first intoxication 
any brand of wine will do. The one French con- 
ferencier from whom all good Gallophiles should 
immediately have fled was, by a strange mischance, 
precisely the one that riveted their attention. 
Three of our leading universities and huge bands 
of our socially important womanhood succumbed 
instantly to his charm. It is to the honor of the 
French nation that it sent over to us as a rule 
only perfectly sensible persons; but it really was 
not necessary. It might have sent over imbeciles 
and in the very centre of our American French 
culture no one would have noticed anything amiss. 
In the present state of our knowledge subtle dis- 
tinctions of this sort are thrown away on us. 

We can pay Frenchmen every compliment in 
the world except that of telling them apart. Even 
our most cultivated critics, having it on good au- 
thority that a gifted French author has a brilliant 
style, will generally quote by a strange fatality the 
rare passages in his writings that are entirely 
commonplace. 

I do not blame other Americans for dabbling in 
French, since I myself am the worst of dabblers, 
but I see no reason why any of us should pretend 
that it is anything more than dabbling. The usual 
way of reading French does not lead even to an 
acquaintance with French literature. Everybody 



A GALLOMANIAC 167 

knows that words in a living language in order 
to be understood have to be lived with. They 
are not felt as a part of living literature when you 
see them pressed out and labeled in a glossary, 
but only when you hear them fly about. A word 
is not a definite thing susceptible of dictionary ex- 
planation. It is a cluster of associations, reminis- 
cent of the sort of men that used it, suggestive 
of social class, occupation, mood, dignity or the 
lack of it, primness, violences, pedantries or plati- 
tudes. It hardly seems necessary to say that words 
in a living literature ought to ring in the ear with 
the sounds that really belong to them, or that 
poetry without an echo cannot be felt. Poetry if 
it rings in the ears of the usual American reader 
of French literature must inevitably make a noise 
that in no wise resembles any measured human 
sound; it is merely a punctuated din. But prob- 
ably it does not sound at all; it is probably read 
as stenographic notes. 

It may be that there is no 1 way out of it. Per- 
haps it is inevitable that the colleges which had 
so long taught the dead languages as if they were 
buried should now teach the living ones as if they 
were dead. But there is no need of pretending 
that this formal acquaintance with the books re- 
sults in an appreciation of literature. No sense of 
the intimate quality of a writer can be founded on a 
verbal vacuum. His plots, his place in literature, 



1 68 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

his central motives, and the opinion of his critics 
could all be just as adequately conveyed, if his 
books were studied in the language of the deaf 
and dumb. Of course, one may be drawn to an 
author by that process but it would hardly be the 
artistic attraction of literature; it is as if one 
felt drawn to a woman by an interest exclusively 
in her bones. Elementary as these remarks may 
seem I offer them to Gallophiles without apology. 
On the contrary I rather fear that I am writing 
over their heads. 

Of course nobody realizes how far away he is, 
for the pursuit of the French language in this 
country is invariably accompanied by the belief 
that it has been overtaken. One hardly ever meets 
an American who knows any French at all who is 
not filled with a strange optimism as to the amount 
of it, for the learning of French is a sort of 
course in progressive hallucination, everybody be- 
lieving, both teacher and taught, that he is further 
along than he is. 

I have heard it said that some day there might 
be such a change in the system of teaching as 
would enable a careful student, after seven years, 
to face an actual French person without stuttering, 
without wild and groundless laughter, without 
agony of gesture, and without gargling his throat. 
I have heard reformers say that the American 
expert in the French language really must be saved 



A GALLOMANIAC 169 

from the sort of embarrassments he now under- 
goes. He ought not to be obliged, for example, 
they say, to leave a house by the fire-escape because 
he cannot ask his way to the door; or to be served 
four times to potatoes because he cannot say, 
"Je n'en veux plus; or to go about insulting peo- 
ple whom he has no desire to insult; or to use 
language to his hostess which he finds afterward 
to have been highly obscene; or to tell a story in 
a mystic tongue, known only to himself, com- 
pounded of the ruins of two languages, or in the 
deaf-and-dumb alphabet supplemented by gym- 
nastic feats, or in words so far apart that every- 
body in the room listens to the ticking of the clock 
between them. 

I know nothing about the chance of future 
changes, but I have observed very often the pres- 
ent results; and I will reproduce here as accurately 
as I can the table-talk of a serious and by no 
means unintelligent man, a finished product of the 
present system. He begins, of course, almost in- 
variably by telling the French person that sits next 
to him that he is a woman or that he is not a 
woman. He will then say that he is in the rear 
because a long time ago he was held underneath 
the city; that he tilled the soil of his office slowly; 
that he did not jump till six o'clock, though he 
usually jumps at five; that he likes cats and oaks 
and that he had a cat and an oak once who would 



170 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

eat in the cup together; that his aunt had a cat 
who killed six smiles in one day; that he had 
dropped a piece of bread on the ceiling; that it is 
a good time though the paper promised tears; that 
he swims better in dirty water than in cool because 
it throws him up in the air. And he will ask for 
the following objects, all of which he believes can 
be found on the table or easily obtained: A sad- 
dle — he wants to put some of it in his soup; a 
hillside; a little more of the poison; a pear-tree; 
a bass wind instrument full of milk; the hide of 
any animal; a farmer's daughter of shameless 
character; and a portion of a well-set, thick, short- 
backed horse. 

Now this sort of thing will happen not only to 
almost any student under the present system, but 
to the majority of the teachers themselves, and as 
a rule they do not know that it is happening. 
Many Americans will talk French at intervals all 
through their lives without ever finding out that 
they are not saying a word in French; so great 
are the powers of divination among the gifted 
people with whom they converse. And again and 
again you will see persons who have not emerged 
from the condition of the young man whose con- 
versation I have quoted chosen as French teachers 
in institutions of learning. It is compatible with 
present standards of scholarship. One may be- 
have in this manner and publish an intelligible 



A' GALLOMANIAC 171 

monograph on the Felibrige. One may curl up in 
some corner of Romance philology where he will 
never be disturbed, or range through five centuries 
of French literature, putting authors in their 
places, or make those unnecessary remarks beneath 
a classic text which constitute the essence of foot- 
note gentility; in short, one may be Teutonically 
efficient all around and about the French language 
— over it and under it and behind it — and never 
once be in it, never once be able to enter into the 
simplest human relation with any one who uses it. 
And if he is a true product of the system he 
will be perfectly satisfied. He will say that chat- 
tering with French people is only a pleasant ac- 
complishment, after all, and can easily be acquired 
at any time by living with them ; that it has nothing 
in common with the aims of serious scholarship; 
that it is not to be compared in importance with 
the ability to read and appreciate books; that 
there is no room for it in the present system and 
that it would not be desirable if there were. He 
will add lightly that some time he means to brush 
up his French conversation. He will say this with- 
out a qualm, without a trace of pity for the peo- 
ple he means to brush it on. He does not know 
that an American brushing his French in a room 
bears the same relation to any peaceful conversa- 
tion that may be going on in it at the time as is 
borne by a carpet-sweeper in action. He does 



1721 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

not know that an American when brushing his 
French ought to be kept out of rooms. He does 
not know that if in the future the relations be- 
tween this country and France should unhappily 
become strained it will be largely due to Ameri- 
cans brushing French. The system not only with- 
holds from us the means of understanding the 
French language; it encourages us to misunder- 
stand it. It fills us with the assurance that we are 
doing easily what we are not doing at all. It 
seems as if American instruction in French were 
designed for the frustration of civilized inter- 
course. 

I cannot really blame that French lady who, 
after long association with the American function- 
aries in Paris during the war, pronounced the 
opinion that at their best Americans are children 
and at their worst they are brutes; nor can I 
blame the Americans. I have no doubt that a 
large part of the unpleasantness was linguistic. 
It is probable that every one of those Americans 
was trying to say something very agreeable to the 
lady, but when put into language it turned out 
the other way. It is probable that many of them 
cursed the lady and never knew. 



CLASSIC DEBATE 

In one of those good, solid British papers, 
where, time out of mind, correspondents have 
flashed Latin quotations at the editor, or written 
long letters on "What constitutes a gentleman?" 
they were still, even in war-time, debating in their 
usual way, the question of the classics, and they 
are as busy with it as ever to-day. 

The argument on each side is always very 
simple. One tells you that with Latin and Greek 
he would never have been the man he now is. 
The other says that he would never have been 
the man he now is without them. They sometimes 
vary it by saying that they would have sooner be- 
come the men they now are, with (or without) 
the classics. Stripped to its bare bones, the debate 
seems to be a contest between self-satisfactions. 
Why each is so pleased with his present condition 
is never explained. 

Yet that is obviously of the first importance. 
Who cares how a mind was nourished if he can 
see no reason why he should place any value on 
the mind? When "Doctor of Divinity" writes 
at great length on behalf of his humanities, he 

173 



174 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

does not appear particularly humane, and if 
"Biologist" is glad to be without any humanities 
at all, there is nothing about "Biologist" per- 
sonally that tends to make you glad as well. On 
the contrary, you would often like to take the 
classics out of "Doctor of Divinity" and thrust 
them into "Biologist," just by way of shifting 
things about a bit on the chance of improving the 
situation. 

"Philonous" and "Scientificus" come out about 
even in dullness, and when old "Philomathicus" 
writes from Warwickshire about all that Vergil 
has done for him, everyone with a grain of good 
taste is sorry Vergil did it. To the mind of an 
impartial witness it always ends in a draw. If 
they did not brag about it, you could no more tell 
which of them had had the classics and which had 
not, than you could tell which was vaccinated, if 
they did not roll up their sleeves. The only thing 
you can make out of the affair, with scientific cer- 
tainty, is that in every case either the education 
was wrong or the wrong man was educated. 
And that must be precisely the impression that is 
left on any anxious British parent who seriously 
observes the usual culture squabble as it comes out 
in the magazines. He must long to save the 
child from the ultimate fate of either party to it. 
He would hate in after life to have the child ex- 
plode like the gentleman who is so proud of his 



CLASSIC DEBATE 175 

classic contents; he would hate to see the child 
some day cave in like the gentleman who is so 
proud to be without them. For that unsatisfac- 
tory termination is almost the rule in these violent 
culture contests. Each combatant before he can 
reach his adversary seems to go to pieces all by 
himself. Never by any chance does one kill the 
other, though you would suppose on the first in- 
spection of each one of them that nothing could 
be easier to do. 

It is the same way with the discussion of the 
question in this country though it is here more 
likely to turn on considerations of practical utility. 
The practical utility argument, for or against the 
study of Latin and Greek, seems to me to break 
down for the same reason that the German effi- 
ciency argument broke down during the war. 
That is to say, it does not take into consideration 
the imponderables. From a good many articles 
setting forth to what extent Latin and Greek have 
helped or hindered the respective writers in their 
careers it would appear that the only test that 
they apply is that of contemporary social im- 
portance. 

If I were to say, for example, that but for 
my firm grasp at the age of twelve on the exact 
difference between the gerund and the gerundive, 
I should not have risen to what I have risen to, 
it would not be accounted an argument for the 



176 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

classics, but rather as a warning against them. 
People would look me up and find that I had not 
risen to anything. 

But if I should stand splendidly forth as presi- 
dent of the All-Columbian Amalgamated Boot and 
Shoe Concern and attribute my well-known or- 
ganizing talent to the mastery at an early age of 
Xenophon's Anabasis, there would be instant 
cheering in the classical ranks; whereas if I said 
that had it not been for Xenophon's Anabasis, I 
should have got ahead much faster, should, in fact, 
have fairy whizzed into my presidency of the shoe 
business, shouts of triumph would at once ascend 
from the Modern School. 

There you have the sort of test that is regarded 
as really practical — what the classics actually did 
to some large, perfectly substantial and hard- 
headed shoe man. It is a test much valued in this 
debate. 

If I were a classical scholar I would not rest 
my case on these arguments from practical life, 
as the term practical is understood in these dis- 
cussions. It may be gratifying if one can cite a 
dozen bank presidents who approve of Latin and 
Greek, but it is a short-lived pleasure. Some one 
is soon citing two dozen who disapprove of them. 
I have just finished reading the fifteenth article 
published within the last two years, which pro- 
ceeds on the same assumption in respect to a prac- 



CLASSIC DEBATE 177 

tical life. The writer rounds up in defense of the 
classics a considerable number of the politically, 
commercially, and scientifically successful persons 
of the moment. There are one President, two 
ex-Presidents, two Secretaries of State, and a 
handsome showing of administrators, bankers, 
heads of trust and insurance companies, engineers, 
mathematicians, electricians, economists, botanists, 
zoologists, psychologists, physicists, and chemists. 
This may have been a more bountiful and seduc- 
tive list than any anti-classical man had produced 
at that moment, but it is not a more bountiful one 
than he could produce, if you gave him time. It 
contains fifty professors of science, both pure and 
applied. The man who could not within a week 
produce fifty-five on the other side would not be 
worth his salt as an anti-classical debater. Then 
the unfortunate writer of the first article would 
have to find five more, and thus the debate would 
resolve itself into a mad competitive scramble for 
botanists, engineers, business men, and the like, 
to which, so far as I can see, there would be no 
logical conclusion till they had all been caught and 
tabulated. And after this was all done, we should 
be just where we were when we started. For the 
success of these successful persons is not a suc- 
csful test. 

If the majority of them knew, what they never 
could know — that is to say that they presided, 



1 7 81 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

banked, administered, engineered, insured, botan- 
ized, and psychologized no better for their study 
of the classics, the question of the classics would 
still be as open as before. As human beings they 
were probably engaged during a considerable 
portion of their lives in doing other things than 
climbing into presidencies or directng banks or 
building bridges or organizing other human 
beings. If not, they were forlorn creatures whom 
it is not desirable to reproduce. As human beings 
their leisure was probably a matter of some prac- 
tical concern to them. Statistics of success cannot 
decide a question that pertains to their personal 
leisure. I doubt if statistics of success can decide 
any question at all, when the standard of success 
is the vague, unstable, arbitrary thing implied in 
these discussions. Nobody wants his own life 
regulated by the way a chance majority of these 
successful persons happen to feel about theirs. 
Still less would he want his children to be brought 
up only to resemble them. Every plain person 
realizes that there is a vast domain of thought, 
feeling, and activity, including religion, music, 
poetry, painting, sport, dancing, among many 
other things that subsists quite independently of 
the good or bad opinions of any motley group of 
persons picked out by educators as successful at 
this day. 

When they tell you that some railway manager 



CLASSIC DEBATE 179 

thinks that Latin has helped him in his labors and 
that he still reads Horace for pleasure, they are 
telling you nothing either for or against the study 
of Latin. Prove that the study of Latin and 
Greek so sapped a man's vitality that he lost five 
years in getting to the top of his gas company, and 
you have really proved nothing against it. Prove 
that tlhe extraordinary mental energy acquired by 
the perusal of Hoedus stans in tecto domus lupum 
vidit praetereuntem shot him into the United 
States Senate at thirty^six and you have not said 
one word in its favor. This seems fairly obvious, 
but the contrary assumption underlies a vast area 
of educational printed matter on the subject — all 
based on a standard of momentary success, that 
is to say, a standard of momentary public toler- 
ation. 

Yet even an educator would not be any more 
eager to have his daughter learn to dance, if he 
knew that the chief justice of the Supreme Court 
had danced regularly all through his career for 
its beneficial effects upon his profession, and was 
now dancing almost every moment of the day just 
for the pleasure of it. He does not want the 
doings of the chief justice to mould his daughter's 
life in all particulars. He probably would just as 
lief she did not resemble in many ways that un- 
doubtedly respectable person. 

And the question of the classics is in this outside 



1 8a THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

domain, whatever their casual relation may be to 
a random group of professional, business, and 
scientific activities. It is true, for example, that 
the best poetry in the English or any other lan- 
guage is detested by the one thousand ablest 
executives in this country at this moment. But 
that is not supposed, even among educators, to 
have any relevance to the question of its value. 
Even in the wildest educational articles of the 
month, you do not find this fact advanced as a 
conclusive argument from practical life for the 
promotion of the detestation of poetry. Nobody 
takes the child aside and says: "Hate poetry and 
up you go to the very top of the drygoods 
business." 

These arguments assume that any influence was 
harmful if it delayed these not very interesting 
persons in blossoming into the sort of beings they 
afterwards became. From reading the testimony 
of these persons it is impossible to discern any 
reason for that belief. Each one implies that if 
he had had his way, he would have become the 
man he is much sooner. But how does he know 
that he did not become the man he is too soon? 
Writers on the subject find an argument for a 
course of study in the mere fact that it has 
speeded miscellaneous successful persons along 
the way they went toward the places where you 
happen to find them, when so far as any sensible 



CLASSIC DEBATE 181 

man can see, they might just as well be somewhere 
else. 

But perhaps educators do not really attach any 
importance to this nonsense. They are, no doubt, 
more sensible than they seem. There is no use in 
taking the malign view of educators that their 
personalties resemble their usual educational arti- 
cles. They probably do not believe any more 
than I do in a neat hierarchy of success with the 
better man always a peg above the worse one, or 
that if you skim the cream of contemporary cele- 
brites you will have a collection of more practical 
lives than if you had taken the next layer or the 
layer below that. Practical lives, as led in Ger- 
many during the last forty years or so, must begin 
to seem to them now somewhat visionary. And 
they can hardly retain a sublime confidence in the 
standards of success of their own generation, 
which, though equipped with the very latest 
modern efficiency tests and appliances, neverthe- 
less reverted overnight almost to a state of can- 
nibalism. They probably would admit that in- 
stead of compelling the next generation to re- 
semble the sort of persons that society has often 
permitted to become uppermost in this, it might 
be only humane to give it a fair chance of not 
resembling them. When you read the language 
of educational disputes tradition begins to seem a 
reasonable thing. Educational debaters argue 



1 821 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

with an air of mathematical certainty, as if work- 
ing out an equation, and then produce a solution 
containing such hopelessly unknown quantities as 
the value of the opinion of fifty-seven more or 
less accidentally important persons as to the sort 
of lives all the rest of the world should live. 

Of course, these speed tests of education ap- 
plied to public careers are unconvincing, simply 
because the larger part of life does not consist in 
publicly careering. And distrust of the middle- 
aged successful man on the subject of his own edu- 
cation is justified, because he is an instinctive 
partisan of his own success. It would be a cruel 
thing to entrust writers on education with their 
own education. If they had been brought up on 
their own writings many of them would never 
have pulled through. 

Take for instance, the illustrious case of Mr. 
Bernard Shaw. Mr. Shaw favored a system of 
education which began by abolishing almost every- 
thing and which would certainly have resulted in 
abolishing Mr. Shaw. It was a good, clean, con- 
sistent sweep of every tradition. It abolished 
homes, marriage, fathers, mothers, schools, rules, 
text-books, settled residence, settled convictions, 
moral, social and religious preconceptions or con- 
trols; it rid the child of family ties, personal affec- 
tions, local customs and every other narrowing 
influence, and turned him out to roam and learn 



CLASSIC DEBATE 183 

and so have a chance of free development; every- 
body's children to be brought up by everybody 
else, and thus escape the danger of spoiling and 
all to be kept in constant motion all over the 
British Isles lest they contract a local prejudice — 
each to be perfectly free in all respects except that 
he must not entertain a settled principle or meet a 
relative. 

Now I do not criticize this system, nor do I 
deny that it may be just as sensible as the ideas 
of modern educational writers generally. But I 
do contend that if Mr. Shaw had been brought 
up under it the modern English and American 
stage would have lost its brightest light. He 
curses all restraints on his development. I am 
grateful to them, for I am quite sure they saved 
his life. A Shaw more Shavian than he actually 
became would have been hanged at the age of 
twenty. 

And I should take tradition rather than the word 
of Mr. G. H. Wells in those two novels of his 
on the subject of education. I believe the classical 
tradition had more to do with the making of Mr. 
H. G. Wells than any treatise on biology that he 
ever read. Mr. Wells has more in common with 
Plato than he has with Herbert Spencer, and it 
is because he writes more in the style of the 
Phaedo than he does in the style of The Principles 
of Sociology that we read him. If Mr. Wells con- 



1 84 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

siders Plato a dull old fool, as he probably does, 
that has nothing to do with it. He has absorbed 
since his nativity a literature that has been steeped 
for many centuries in the writings of these old 
fogies he despises. In a sense they own him, so 
far as there is anything in him that is worth per- 
manently possessing. Mr. Wells is essentially a 
very ancient person, but, being incapable of self- 
inspection, he does not know how he came by a 
large part of his incentives and suggestions. That 
is why he has so often moved in circles rediscover- 
ing old thoughts that antedate the Christian era, 
and thinking they were new. If an archeologist 
examined Mr. Wells, he would find him full of 
the ruins of ancient Rome, and he is much the 
brisker writer for containing them. Nobody 
would be reading Mr. H. G. Wells to-day if he 
were a mere product of contemporary science. If 
he could have applied his theory of education to 
his own bringing-up he would have committed 
literary suicide. 

I mention these writers as the most conspicuous 
examples of failure to take into account the im- 
ponderables. I believe that it is these imponder- 
ables which account in a large measure for any- 
thing in them that is likely to prove to be perma- 
nent; in short that they are the product of the 
humanism that they disown. I believe that so far 
as they or any other exceptional living writers are 



CLASSIC DEBATE 185 

in a permanent sense lively, they are in reality 
dancing to tunes played by persons who died be- 
fore the Christian era. 

A better instance than either of these typical 
contemporaries is that of one of their immediate 
ancestors. Samuel Butler in "The Way of All 
Flesh" is almost as ferocious toward Latin and 
Greek as he is toward fathers and mothers. He 
suggests no substitute for Latin or Greek any 
more than he suggests a substitute for fathers and 
mothers, but he implies that all four should be 
abandoned instantly on the chance that substitutes 
may turn up. Now I know that the radicalism 
of Samuel Butler in respect to these and other 
matters is what mainly interests the modern com- 
mentator. But it has nothing to do> with his per- 
manent interest. Dozens of more radical writers 
may be found everywhere who are exceedingly 
dull. The value of "The Way of All Flesh" is in 
its texture — the weaving together of a thousand 
small things — and not in a few large, central 
thoughts. Essentially it is in the best tradition of 
the English novel. Also it is hopelessly entangled 
with the classics. He had to make his hero take 
honors in them at the university in order to get 
the muscle to attack them. He is a prize-fighter 
who knocks out his own boxing-masters in his in- 
dignation at having learned nothing from them. 

But I suppose the arguments I have been quot- 



1 86 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

ing are merely the little missiles of debate. I 
doubt if any one really thinks it is a matter to be 
settled by the points at which persons happen to 
be perching in society at the present moment. I 
suppose these writers would admit that the classics 
are not and never have been chiefly valuable as 
the means of success. They are obviously valued 
as the means of escaping its consequences. They 
are not esteemed for getting one on in the modern 
world, but for getting one pleasantly out of it — 
that is to say for the exactly opposite reason to 
that which social statistics, psychological measure- 
ments of mental growth, testimony of engineers, 
educational specialists, chemists and bank directors 
always emphasize. 

Men turn to the classics in the hope of meeting 
precisely the sort of people who would not write 
these articles on the classics. Men turn to the 
classics to escape from their contemporaries. Cur- 
rent arguments do not affect the central point, 
namely the wisdom of breaking with a tradition 
that has bound together the literatures of the 
world for twenty centuries and has vivified a large 
proportion of the greatest authors in our own. 

'But I do not believe that any muddle of present- 
day educational policy can do any lasting damage. 
Suppose it goes from bad to worse. Suppose after 
ceasing to be required, the study of Latin and 
Greek ceases even to be admitted. Suppose this 



CLASSIC DEBATE 187 

is followed by another plunge of progress that 
would dazzle even Mr. Wells and a mere parsing 
acquaintance with a Latin author is regarded as 
not merely frivolous, or eccentric, like fox-trotting 
or button- collecting, but as downright heinous, 
like beer-drinking in the teeth of a Prohibition 
gale. 

Imagine even graver changes — imagine the era 
of scientific barbarism dawning in 1925 as the un- 
scientific era of barbarism dawned in 476 and 
Soviets set up everywhere in America, and paper 
scarce as everything would be under Bolshevism, 
and Latin and Greek books turned again into 
palimpsets and obliterated and replaced with 
strange dark Bolshevik texts presumably all writ- 
ten in the Yiddish language. Nevertheless, at the 
blackest moment of black Bolshevism they would 
still be read just as they were still read at the very 
darkest moment of the ages which we call dark. 

The Bolshevists could be no worse for them 
than were the German tribes. Here and there 
half-human Bolhevists would preserve a text just 
as here and there the less fanatical monks did, 
and there would be a vast deal of subterranean 
scholarship at work, all the keener on account of 
persecution. Probably Bolshevist suppression 
would do no more harm than the teaching of 
American Germanized college professors did dur- 
ing the last generation. In fact, it might actually 



1 8 8! THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

be a great deal better if we were to persecute the 1 
classics than to teach them as we do. When 
you read the notes in the usual school Vergil, 
simple illiteracy takes on a certain charm. 

Make Latin and Greek illegal, and caves in the 
mountains will gradually fill up with refugees bear- 
ing dictionaries — refugees from the great sprawl- 
ing documentary modern novel, from modern 
philosophies gone stale in ten years, from new 
thoughts better expressed twenty-four hundred 
years ago, from the yearly splash of new poets 
swimming along in schools, from religions of 
good digestion, competitions for public astonish- 
ment, the shapeless solemnity of presidential mes- 
sages and serious magazines, in short, from all the 
incoherency and formlessness of the tremendous 
opinions of the too familiar present moment which 
somehow for the life of him nobody can manage 
to remember the next moment. It may not be a 
bad experiment. It will inevitably be followed by 
a renaissance. 



THE CHOICE OF BAD MANNERS 

An Englishman's burdens are hard enough to 
bear without a London writer's insisting that from 
this time on he shall expand into "warmth and 
cordiality" at the first meeting with a stranger; 
and the writer, though right in his view of the 
importance of Anglo-American goodwill, is wrong 
in saying that the chill of the British introduction 
causes suffering in this country. The grimness 
of that first moment has already become tradi- 
tional and it is now expected by every people in 
the world. There is no hardship in the long 
silence and the leaden eye when you are prepared 
for them and know they mean no harm. On the 
other hand an encounter with a suddenly expand- 
ing Englishman would be shocking, in its sharp 
reversal of all precedents. . There is no reason 
why the Englishman, like other solids, should not 
have his melting point. If he unbent on first 
acquaintance, he would seem like a ramrod that 
melted in the sun. Smile after the first handshake, 
says this writer, and be natural — as if anything 
could be less natural to a well-bred Englishman, 
than any such wild social turbulence. No one ex- 

189 



1 9a THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

pects warmth from him out of hand any more 
than one expects a hen to lay a soft-boiled egg 
for him; and a wise man will blame the one no 
more than the other. After all, why is their way 
worse than ours? There is no greater hardship 
in having to dig conversation out of an English- 
man than in having to dig yourself out of the con- 
versation of your fellow citizens. 

But there does seem to be a misunderstanding 
between those two small classes in the two coun- 
tries who are mainly concerned with the outward 
gentilities. And in regard to the true nature of 
snobbery, they are certainly at odds. I think our 
side has the right of it — my patriotic bias, perhaps. 

"How the Americans do love a Duke!" is a 
frequent comment in certain British journals, and 
they then proceed to the sober generalization that 
"the United States is a nation of flunkies and of 
snobs." Whoever will be at the pains to follow 
British weekly journalism will find this sentiment 
repeated every little while. He will observe 
among this class of writers that vulgarity is a 
matter of geography, being reckoned from Pall 
Mall as time is from Greenwich. 

Now as to snobs, New York's streets are of 
course often choked with them. A duke, an 
elephant, a base-ball pitcher on Fifth Avenue, 
may at any time be the center of a disproportion- 
ate and servile attention from both the American 



THE CHOICE OF BAD MANNERS 191 

people and the press. Yet the cult of the egreg- 
ious and the greatly advertised has never the deep 
devotion of sound snobbery. 

Take the American newspaper view of "so- 
ciety," for example. You would certainly have to 
call that snobbery. A friend of mine once became 
quite indignant on the subject and wrote about it 
bitterly. According to the newspapers, said he, 
all the blessings and misfortunes of life fall only 
on people who are "in society." He wanted to 
know why in Heaven's name they print such 
"arrant nonsense," and he asked, "If we are not 
all snobs, why try so hard to make us so ?" 

Now of course this country is full of climbers. 
No one here is content with that station in life 
to which it has pleased God to call him; and if 
he were, some female relative would surely push 
him along. And since we are all trying to "get 
on," with a pretty fair chance of it, for our dullest 
people are always at the top, it is not strange that 
we should value all the little symbols of on-getting, 
and being "in society" is one of them. What if 
"society" does stretch as far as the wives of six 
plumbers at a luncheon? What if the term itself 
fades into a mere newspaper gesture or habit 
and a society reporter at a scene of South African 
carnage would probably, by mere reflex action, 
write, "Hottentot Society Girl Spears Five?" 
That does not turn readers into snobs. On the 



i9Z THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

contrary, it confuses the snobbery they had before, 
and leaves them without a social chart or compass. 
A snob cannot tell from an American newspaper 
what to be snobbish about. The acreage of our 
newspaper snobbery is of course enormous. Even 
England, the Sinai of top-hat commandments, land 
of Turveydrop, George Osborne, and Sir Wil- 
loughby Patterne, England itself shows not so 
wide and foolish an expanse of newspaper snob- 
bery. But the true measure of snobbery is not 
in area, but in depth. At the bottom of a true 
snob his snobbery is united with his religion. Re- 
spectable British papers do not, like our own, mix 
up all sorts of people under "society" and chatter 
about them every day; to them it is a real thing 
and holy. Our papers confound snobbery; theirs 
treat it with respect. Try as we will, we cannot 
really tell who's who; we know that we are guess- 
ing. At the root of American snobbery is the 
cruel canker of distrust. "Society," as an Ameri- 
can newspaper concept, includes any member of 
the Caucasian race not necessarily rich or even 
well-to-do, but better off than somebody else some- 
where. If interest in it is snobbish, it is one of 
the broadest, least invidious forms of snobbishness 
ever known, approximating, one might say, a 
pretty general brotherly love; for it draws the 
mind to a Harlem sociable, and attracts the human 
soul to the strange, wild doings of Aldermen's 



THE CHOICE OF BAD MANNERS 193 

wives at their tea-tables in Brooklyn, probably 
clad in goatskins. 

It is not for an upstart and volatile people to 
dispute the calm supremacy of authentic snobbery. 
Your true snob is not inquisitive at all, for he has 
no sense of any social values not his own. He 
does not flourish in a sprawling and chaotic con- 
tinent. It is among the tightly closed minds of 
tight little islands that he is seen at his best. Our 
snobbery is not a sturdy plant, for its vigor is 
sapped by that social uncertainty at the root of 
it; and what is taken for it here usually springs 
from quite alien qualities — curiosity, a vast social 
innocence, and a blessed inexperience of rank. 
To be sure, if King George came to New York 
some one might clip his coat-tails for a keepsake ; 
and it is quite probably that Mrs. Van Allendale, 
of Newport, if asked to meet him, would be all 
of a tremble whether to address him as "Sire" or 
"My God." But what has this in common with 
the huge assurances of true snobbery — its enorm- 
ous certainty of the Proper Thing, in clothes, peo* 
ple, religion, sports, manners, and races, and its 
indomitable determination not to guess again? 

I wish I could do justice to the type of British 
literary journalism in which this sort of thing ap- 
pears. I have tried many times in the twenty years 
of my observation but never to my satisfaction. 
I suppose it will do no harm to try again. I shall 



i 9 4 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

have to typify it under the imaginary title of The 
Gentleman's Review, because to pick out a single 
one of the several competitors- would be invidious. 
The essential point of The Gentleman's Review 
is that it is written by persons of the better sort 
for persons of the better sort. And not only 
must the writer be a better sort of person; he 
must constantly say that he is a better sort of 
person, and for pages at a time he must say noth- 
ing else. I have read long articles which when 
boiled down told the reader nothing else. I have 
read articles on socialism, patriotism, labor pro- 
grammes, poetry, the vulgarity of America and 
of the Antipodes, and on divers other subjects 
which did literally tell nothing else to the socialist, 
laborer, poet, or American or Antipodean outcast 
who read them. The gentility of the writers is 
never merely suggested; it is announced, and 
usually in terms of severity. A coal-heaver read- 
ing The Gentleman's Review would be informed 
in words of unsparing cruelty that he is low. In- 
deed, it seems the main purpose — at times the only 
purpose — for which the Review exists — to tell 
coal-heavers and other outside creatures that they 
are low. And by outside creatures I mean almost 
everybody. I mean not only all Americans, all 
Canadians, and other inhabitants of a hemisphere 
which, to say the least, is in the worst possible taste 
as a hemisphere, besides being notoriously ex- 



THE CHOICE OF BAD MANNERS 195 

ternal to the British Isles. I mean almost every- 
body in the right kind of hemisphere. I mean 
almost everybody in the British Isles, or even on 
the better streets of London. Only a handful of 
people can read the typical article of The Gentle- 
man's Review without feeling that they are at 
the bottom of a social precipice. 

The ideal of the true-born Gentleman's Re- 
viewer is not only social exclusiveness, but mental 
exclusiveness. He does not argue against an idea 
of which he disapproves; he shows that idea to 
the door. In a long paper on some form of 
radicalism he will say at the start that he must 
really refuse to speak of radicalism. The right 
sort of people do not speak of radicalism. They 
have dismissed it from their minds. And he de- 
votes his paper to developing the single point that 
the only way to deal with radicals is to expunge 
them from your list of acquaintances the moment 
you find out that they are radicals, and thereafter 
not to say a single word to them beyond conveying 
the bare information that they have been expunged. 
I recall just such a paper as this, and I recall the 
impression it made on seven extremely dignified 
persons whose successive letters to the editor, all 
dated from respectable London clubs, declared 
that in the opinion of the writers the danger of 
radicalism could not be averted in any other way : 
Gentlemen must dismiss radicals from their com- 



igQ THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

pany just as they had dismissed radicalism from 
their minds. That done, radicalism would perish. 
A writer on a Labor-party programme in The 
Gentleman! 's Review would no more think of meet- 
ing the arguments for the Labor-party programme 
than he would think of meeting the laboring-man 
himself. Why bother to prove a Labor-party 
programme unsound in face of the towering ab- 
surdity that there should be such a thing as a 
Labor party and that it should have such a thing 
as a programme? There are social certitudes 
that gentlemen do not discuss. When Labor raises 
a question, the Gentleman's Reviewer, if he is true 
to type, will simply raise an eyebrow. When 
woman's progress was blackening the sky, I read 
dozens of article in The Gentleman' 's Review on 
woman's suffrage from which I am sure no reader 
could make out anything whatever except that a 
shudder was running through some gentlemanly 
frames. At the threat of a revolt of the working- 
class some time ago, The Gentleman's Review 
became speechless almost immediately as to the 
nature of the revolt. It could only say that some 
labor leader had been impolite to a member of 
the upper class, and that it feared the lower 
classes might, if they kept on in their present 
courses, become impolite to the upper ones. The 
thought of other perils more horrible than that 
shocked it to silence. But perhaps it could not 



THE CHOICE OF BAD MANNERS 197 

think of other things more horrible than that. 
There are things in this world that minds of this 
gentlemanly quality really must decline to meet. 
They are most of the things in this world. 

It is at its best in rebuking other people's man- 
ners while unconsciously displaying its own. Take 
American manners, for instance. Forty years ago 
it was saying we were rude because we were young. 
It is still saying so. "Centuries of polite interna- 
tional tradition" — we are to understand that it 
took at least that much to make a Gentleman's Re- 
viewer — are not behind us Americans. "Instinc- 
tive delicacy and sympathy with the feelings of 
others" — such as is displayed in the pages of the 
Review — "are not commonly possessed by the 
very young" — meaning, of course, possessed by 
Americans. Why, then, aspire to the courtesy and 
tact of ripe old world-wise Europe? 

As a rude young thing I should not think of 
aspiring to it, if I did not read on the very next 
page, perhaps, that the whole share of the United 
States in the late war, from the very beginning 1 
of it to the very end of it, was merely a "military 
parade." Then the "delicacy" and the "sym- 
pathy" and the "polite international tradition" of 
this fine old world-wise representative are sud- 
denly brought not only within my reach, but within 
easy reach of almost any one. The cook and the 
bootblack and the garbage-man and I, and every 



19& THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

sort of low American, including colored people, 
may now burst out spontaneously and joyously and 
unashamed with all the crudities inherent in our 
natures, knowing that we can go no farther in 
manners of this type than the writers quoted have 
already gone — for the simple reason that there is 
no farther to go. If that is the degree of "tradi- 
tional international politeness" required by the 
rich and mellow culture of an older world, why 
need a Ute or a Yahoo despair of it? Raw man 
from Oklahoma though I am, utterly unfinished, 
confined almost exclusively to the companionship 
of cows, backgroundles's, uncouth, and in social ex- 
perience a tadpole, even I can be as delicately 
urbane as these exponents of an Old World 
culture. 

Now I confess I have idealized the situation in 
representing this element as the sole constituent 
of any single periodical. It may constitute only 
a part of a magazine or newspaper, and it may 
appear only sporadically. Several magazines 
which it pervaded largely at one time have since 
died of it, and others seem about to die. But it 
is still to be found in reassuring quantities, though 
scattered, and one could at any time, by judicious 
selection, make up a Gentleman's Review. 

I believe it is not only harmless, but desirable. 
It is not representative of the English people or 
of any English class. It is the unconscious bur- 



THE CHOICE OF BAD MANNERS 199 

lesque — often a very good one — of insularity, and 
the world is the better for a good burlesque. It 
is no more like the courteous and witty English- 
man one meets in life or in books or in the news- 
papers than is James Yellowplush. If Major Pen- 
dennis or Podsnap came to life again and turned 
into literary persons, they would write like The 
Gentleman' s Review. And it is pleasant to meet 
again the Pendennises and Podsnaps. Finally it 
has supplied many objects of entertaining satire to 
the best English writers of plays and fiction during 
our own generation. There is only one bad thing 
about it and that is entirely the fault of my fellow- 
countrymen. Owing to the unfortunate colonial- 
ism of the American literary class, there are quart- 
ers in which this sort of thing is taken seriously. 
I believe when that happens it is a surprise, even 
to the Gentleman's Reviewer himself. I believe 
even he is secretly aware that, whatever nature's 
reason for presenting him to a patient world may 
be, it cannot be for any such purpose as that. 

In regard to American manners, by the way, 
what nonsense we ourselves are in the habit of 
writing; why these serious articles every now and 
then on the decline of American manners? One 
appeared only the other day in a New York 
magazine. Declined from what, I wonder. We 
have no manners now, to be sure, but there is not 
a sign that at any moment of our past history we 



2oa THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

ever had any. One would suppose that the prim 
people who tell us from time to time that the 
"subtle note of real distinction is fading from so- 
ciety" would be at some pains to ascertain when 
and where it had bloomed. The "graceful civil- 
ities of our grandfathers have vanished," they say. 
But do they mean literally grandfathers? If so, 
that would take us back to about the era of Mr. 
Potiphar and the Reverend Cream Cheese and 
ormolu and universal drunkenness. If they mean 
great-grandfathers, one has a notion that about 
that time the Hon. Lafayette Kettle and Hannibal 
Chollop were not uncommon types. If they insist 
on the eighteen-thirties, the "subtle note of real 
distinction" must have been extremely hard to 
find, to judge from de Tocqueville and Mrs. Trol- 
lope, while in the decade before that, Stendhal 
and the younger Gallatin had never found a trace 
of it. Sometimes they wave the hand in a general 
sort of way to the "gentle courtesies of a hundred 
years ago," but it was at about that date, I believe, 
that Tom Moore was complaining that our man- 
ners were rotten before they were ripe, while at 
the close of the eighteenth century we find that 
very agreeable French gentlman, M. Moreaud de 
Saint-Mery, remarking the singular brutality of 
the gentle families of Philadelphia — not in a very 
exacting temper, either, for he merely insisted that 
people ought to show more of a spirit of social 



THE CHOICE OF BAD MANNERS 201 

helpfulness than to go on skating while their 
friends were falling through the ice and drowning. 
And these being merely the haphazard recollec- 
tions of extremely desultory readings, one natur- 
ally infers that the bibliography of bad manners 
must be enormous and that the dates in it, as the 
history of the country goes, would probably be of 
quite respectable antiquity. I do not deny that 
there may have been "graceful civilities" at some 
time or other, possibly at Plymouth Rock; I merely 
say that these writers never by any chance produce 
the proof of it, despite one's pardonable skeptic- 
ism. These decorous little lamentations on de- 
cline do, indeed, boil down to nothing. It is as if 
one should say, the "subtle note of real distinction" 
has within the last five years faded from the sub- 
way, or manners are no longer courtly on the 
uptown evening car. 

The frequent appearance of these articles brings 
out an important point of difference between 
French manners and our own. An Englishman 
might write such articles, but a Frenchman, I 
believe could not. Sensible Americans go to 
France for the purpose of escaping the type 
of mind that produces them. They have 
nothing to do with manners, but are merely 
treatises on toothpick orthodoxy. One of them 
begins with an anecdote of a "distinguished 
foreigner" who, when asked what he thought was 



2oz THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

the most striking American characteristic, replied, 
"Your lack of respect for your superiors." After 
rubbing that in for the proper hygienic interval, 
the writer advances to a series of salutary reflec- 
tions like these: "Notching can be further from 
the truth than the conception that personal delicacy 
means personal weakness," and the "unmannered 
man adds nothing to the picture of life." Why 
add to the national stock of uneasy self-conscious- 
ness? Surely there is no country on the face of 
the globe where so many people to the square mile 
are fidgetting over some perfectly worthless pro- 
priety. Silent prayer is the only recourse for any 
honest writer of this type, The moment he 
preaches manners to us he puckers us up still more. 
And there is this further peril in the thumping 
hortatory evangel on the need of being personally 
delicate and refined, delivered by people who from 
their manner of writing seem as much alike and 
rudimentary as doughnuts. If they keep it up 
they will surely start a Movement. We can or- 
ganize for politeness just as well as for mother- 
hood or for reading poetry, and a Federation of 
Clubs of Gentlemanly Endeavor may be even now 
in the wind. The very next writer of this article 
might in the natural order of things find himself 
president of a "nation-wide" organization for the 
promotion of personal delicacy, or at least chair- 
man of his State committee on drawing-room 



THE CHOICE OF BAD MANNERS 203 

charm. I can hear the speech at the founder's din- 
ner, for, of course, the thing would begin with a 
dinner: 

"Gentlemen, the mark of this era of social 
awakening is, as you well know, the spirit of or- 
ganized social service. People have organized in 
our day even in order to chew their own food, 
and the associations for digestion, for child-rear- 
ing, for controlling child-birth, for eating bran, 
going barefoot, reading prose, keeping healthy, 
and looking at birds are innumerable. What the 
individual used formerly to attempt in a feeble 
manner on his own account he now does efficiently 
by co-operative endeavor. Things that in the old 
days no one supposed could be organized are now 
discharged by thoroughly competent societies. 
For example, as you probably know, American 
poetry was organized not long ago, with head- 
quarters at Boston, the secretary being some mem- 
ber of the Lowell family, I believe ; and every one 
of you is doubtless familiar with the practically 
complete organization of posterity under eugeni- 
cal auspices. Now, if after two and a half centur- 
ies personal delicacy, and that subtle something 
which distinguishes the manners of other peoples, 
notably the French, from our own cannot be had 
by individual initiative, it is high time we employed 
the measures already so successful in other fields. 
It is unreasonable to protest against our pro- 



204 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

gramme on the ground that personal delicacy can- 
not be organized. The same argument was ad- 
vanced against the organization of agricultural 
credit several years ago. Nor is there any force 
in the argument that at intervals of three months 
for twenty years articles of equal merit have ap- 
peared in American magazines, each pointing to 
perfect breeding without apparently doing any 
good. Our propaganda involves the printing of 
five such articles every month, to say nothing of 
the leaflets, folders and newspaper paragraphs 
tKat will pour in a steady stream into every corner 
of the country. It is a campaign of education that 
we have in mind. To any one who objects that 
no scheme for the promotion of personal delicacy 
has ever yet succeeded, I reply always with the 
simple question: "How many well-printed, attrac- 
tive folders were sent out?" and he always sub- 
sides immediately." 



TAILOR BLOOD AND THE ARISTOC- 
RACY OF FICTION 

Although, as is well known, tailoring ran for 
three generations in the family of George Mer- 
edith, it would seem from a recent biography that 
his own blood was nearly free from it at the age 
of two. At that age when another boy (aged 
four) came to visit him, he showed, according to 
his biographer, such a marked hauteur of manner 
that the other boy left the house, never to return. 
The aristocratic element in the blood had, he 
thinks, even then overcome the tailor corpuscles. 

Though hauteur at the age of two seems to this 
biographer incompatible with tailor origin, he 
does not on that account reject the tailor origin. 
He does not, like other writers on Meredith, in- 
vent a noble father for Meredith, or omit his birth 
altogether, or call it "mysterious," or dismiss it 
with the usual gasp: "Born of a tailor; who 
would have thought it!" On the contrary, he 
decides to make the best of this whole bad tailor 
business. They were fashionable tailors, at any 
rate, he says, and they may have fitted clothes to 
admirals in the Royal Navy; and the grandfather, 
the 'Great Mel,' had associated on equal terms 

205 



206 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

with county families — was quite the fine gentle- 
man, indeed; and George had inherited the gentle- 
man part of this grandfather, while escaping every 
trace of the tailor portion. 

I am not a syndicalist and I have no especial 
sympathy with a tailor soviet. I certainly should 
no more care to live under a tailor dictatorship 
than under that of any other labor union. But 
if the tailor revolution had to come, and the 
bombs were flying and the streets flowing with 
the blood of customers, I should be happy to see 
certain writers on George Meredith fall into the 
hands of the infuriated mob. 

A reasonable view of the relation between tail- 
oring and aristocracy has been quite beyond the 
power of Meredith commentators — most of them 
having gone all to gooseflesh at the bare thought 
of it. And yet Meredith could never have written 
about upper classes as he did, if he had not been 
the son of a tailor. Only as the son of a tailor 
could he have imagined so many of those radiant 
beings among the daughters of earls. As the son 
of an earl, he would probably have imagined them 
among the daughters of tailors. At all events, 
we should not find them among the daughters of 
earls in any such proportion as we now find them 
in his novels. Tailor-distance from an aristocracy 
in our day is the only safe distance for purpose 
of enchantment. 



ARISTOCRACY OF FICTION 207 

And I wonder if our own "best society" would 
not have stood a better chance in fiction if Ameri- 
can novelists had been sons of tailors. Not of 
course that tailor birth would have made up for 
the lack of certain other qualities that Meredith 
possessed, but it might at least have helped a little. 

There has never been enough illusion about our 
upper class, especially among the talented. In 
fact the more talented people are, the less enthusi- 
astic they seem to be about our upper class. Gifted 
novelists who know our upper class will die in exile 
rather than go on knowing it. Bare acquaintance 
with our upper class drove Henry James from 
this country for ever; better acquaintance with it 
made him the most loyal subject of the British 
Crown. Others have rebounded from contact 
with our upper classes into the mountains of Ver- 
mont. A gifted writer who has once met the 
better sort of people in New York will often re- 
main for ever after rooted in the Middle Ages. 
Nothing seems to kill so quickly all enthusiasm 
for our upper class as contact with it. Even the 
chance of contact checks the flow of fancy. 

It is possible that a really interesting figure in 
our upper class could be created only in the back- 
woods by a writer of great talent who had never 
once emerged. But tailor-distance from our upper 
class might have done something. It is conceiv- 
able that a glamour might be cast over our lead- 



2o8 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

ing families at tailor-distance, by a strong novelist 
who was naturally good at glamour-casting. A 
cook could not write a good American novel of 
caste, being in too close contact with the family, 
but a tailor might. 

No American novelist of the first rank, I be- 
lieve, has ever taken American social distinctions 
with a tailor seriousness. Something of a tailor 
seriousness in that matter will be found of course 
among many good American story-writers, but 
they are not of the highest rank. Tailor-birth, 
for example, would hardly have enabled the late 
Richard Harding Davis to improve on his New 
York heroes and heroines, probably would not have 
have resulted in any change at all. Tailor-birth 
would not have enabled Mr. Robert W. Chambers 
to throw more of a glamour over the golden few 
than he has thrown without it. But the fiction of 
well-bred people in this country has never had the 
benefit of that Meredith combination of tailor- 
birth and great talent. 

Suppose Mr. Howells had been tailor-born 
while remaining equally gifted, for example. He 
might have turned on that upper class of Boston 
a kindling and imaginative eye. He might have 
imagined Meredithian aristocrats in Boston — in- 
teresting people who did as they pleased. High 
birth in Boston need not have been the unpleasant 
thing he describes — making everybody feel what 



ARISTOCRACY OF FICTION 209 

a blessing it is to be born low and elsewhere. 
High birth in Boston, seen through the social haze 
of tailor-distance, might have seemed to him desir- 
able. At all events he would not have learned that 
every well-bred Boston person must be undesir- 
able. He would not have made it a law of his 
fiction that, whereas interesting people who do as 
they please are imaginable, they are not even by 
the wildest riot of the fancy ever to be placed 
among the upper class of Boston. Tailoring 
would have mitigated these rigorous results of a 
too close observation. 

Despite the confusion of classes in our time 
when you never can guess what people will be 
like from the sort of families they are found in, 
Meredith could still believe that Blood will tell. 
And he believed blood told delightfully and in 
the most minute detail. He believed that aristo- 
cratic noses were found on women of the higihest 
class instead of belonging as they generally do to 
shop girls. He believed in a noble bearing 
peculiar to lords which is really common to police- 
men. He imagined in earls the magnificent and 
aristocratic poise and the beauty of Italian day 
labourers. He believed duchesses walked like 
duchesses, when, if we may judge from photo- 
graphs, they must, rather, have tumbled around; 
and he believed that people were as stately as he 
thought they ought to be when he looked at the 



210 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

dignified and imposing castles that they lived in. 

And wit ran in direct ratio to the good birth 
of his characters, and not inversely. That was the 
final touch of tailor sublimity. Meredith not only 
made aristocrats witty in their homes; he made 
polite society dine out wittily. Brilliant talk, such 
as is carried on by Jews, and tolerated nowhere 
in the best society, was attributed by Meredith to 
the class of people by whom the dullest things in 
the world have been said and about whom the 
dullest books in the world have been written. 

Henry James, born in a Harlem tailor-shop 
and never straying far away, Henry James, with 
three tailor ancestors looking down from the walk 
upon him, might have imagined five divinely com- 
plicated women east of Central Park, — at least he 
would not have absolutely refused even to try, on 
the ground that they were unimaginable. Henry 
James might have worked wonders of aristocratic 
subtlety even here, had he remained innocent 
enough, and tailoring was one of the few remain- 
ing guarantees of social innocence. 

I do not say that glorious creatures like Laura 
Middleton, or Diana, or Aminta, or the other 
goddesses of George Meredith could have been 
freely sprinkled in our upper class by any imagina- 
tion short of Meredith's, even with Meredith's 
three-fold tailor start. But I do say that much 
migiht hiave been done for our upper class in fiction 



ARISTOCRACY OF FICTION 211 

by an imagination raised to the third tailor^power 
by inheritance. It never has* had this supreme 
literary chance. What are known as social ad- 
vantages in this country have been fatal to any- 
thing like a poetic conception of our upper class. 
Never show a gifted novelist above the basement 
stairs, if you wish him to retain an exciting sense 
of social altitudes. Keep the better sort of liter- 
ary men away from anybody of the slightest social 
importance, if you wish any glamour to be cast. 
Aristocracies of fiction will never be perceived 
so long as the eyes are open. 

In spite of the Saturday Review, and parliamen- 
tary speeches, and the London Times, and Justin 
McCarthy's Reminiscences, and the vast volume 
of aristocratic British memoirs published by the 
score every year in Meredith's lifetime and our 
own, he created by sheer force of genius, guided 
by an inherited inclination, the illusion that the 
very highest families in England could be amus- 
ing in their homes. Meredith successfully em- 
bodied such a vision of aristocracy as nowadays 
can be confidently entertained only by three old 
maids washing dishes in a farm house. It is ab- 
surd to imagine, as the biographer does, whom I 
have quoted at the beginning of this article, that 
there was no tailor in the blood. 

In the present muddle of a changing social 
order, with the upper class being slowly educated 



2 1 2 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

by the classes below, and getting the little wit it 
has from them, and all the clever people in one 
class flying immediately into another, up or down, 
with blood telling the wrong story and usually a 
very dull one ; with people everywhere turning out 
to be just what they ought not to be from their 
antecedents and surroundings, and with the most 
remarkable of public characters commonly the 
most deadly objects to the private gaze — in these 
conditions of our generation, a feat such as Mere- 
dith achieved becomes increasingly difficult. It 
requires, at the least, the advantage of a tailor 
ancestry. 



OUR REFINEMENT 

I do not object to that excellent lady who is 
to be found at intervals in the literary columns of 
a serious magazine wondering sweetly what the 
May-fly thinks in June. On the contrary, a May- 
fly is a good enough excuse for wonder and 
wonder is a good enough excuse for the most 
exciting kind of imaginative exercise. There is 
no reason why the intimations of immortality con- 
veyed to ladies by May-flys should not be a perma- 
nent part of every serious magazine on earth, 

I do not object, that is to say, to the situation 
itself. I object only to one appalling circumstance. 
It is always the same lady and she is always say- 
ing exactly the same sweet things, and the lan- 
guage she says them in is not a living human 
language. The objectionable thing is the awful 
iterativeness of its subhuman literary propriety. 

And it is the same way with all those other 
things expressive of literary refinement, expressive 
of nothing else, but recurring with a deadly cer- 
tainty, weekly, monthly, perennially, and perhaps 
eternally. Those pious papers on the comic spirit, 
by American professors of English; those happy 

213 



2i 4 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

thoughts on the pleasure of reading good books 
rather than bad; on the imperishable charm of 
that which is imperishably charming; on the su- 
periority of the "things of the spirit" over other 
things not mentioned but presumably gross, such 
as things on the dinner table ; humorous apologues 
of Dame Experience conceived as a school-anis- 
tress; tender souvenirs of quaint great-uncles; 
peeps at a sparrow, nesting — it would be a sin 
to blame them from any other point of view than 
that of the future of the English language, for the 
subjects are irreproachable and the motives that 
actuate the writers on them are as pure as the 
driven snow. But they are the mimetic gentilities 
of what may be called our upper middle literary 
class and they are not expressed in any living 
language. Indeed they tend to rob a language of 
any hope to live. 

Not, of course, that English style is a mere 
matter of vocabulary or that the most rollicking 
use of the American vernacular in utter Shakes- 
pearean defiance of propriety would bring Shakes- 
pearean results. But distinguishable writing does 
after all derive from an immense catholicity and 
a freedom of choice, not only from among words 
that are read but from among words that are 
lived with. Nor can it possibly dispense with what 
the French call the "green" language — least of all 
in this country where the "green" language has 



OUR REFINEMENT 2 1 5 

already acquired a vigor and variety that is mot to 
be found in the books. 

Take for example a passage from almost any 
serious article in an American magazine, say in 
regard to the reconstruction of American educa- 
tion after the war, for nobody had the slightest 
notion what he was writing about when he was 
writing on that subject, and there is never any 
idea in the article that might distract attention 
from the words. 

"It can scarcely be denied that the vital needs of the 
hour call for something more than the disparate and 
unco-ordinated efforts which were unhappily often the 
mark of educational endeavor in the past. That looms 
large in the lesson of the war. If it has taught us nothing 
else the war has at least taught us the necessity of a 
synthetic direction of educational agencies toward a defi- 
nite and realized goal, humanistic in the broad and per- 
manent sense of the term, humanistic, that is to say, with 
due reference to the changing conditions of Society. 
The policy of drift must be abandoned once and for all 
and for it must be substituted a policy of steadfast, 
watchful — etc." 

Not that I have seen this particular passage in 
•an article on the reconstruction of education, but 
it might be found in any of them. It is exactly in 
the vein of all that I have happened to read; and 
jn the best American magazines you will sorne- 
itimes find four pages of eight hundred words 
apiece all made up of just such sentences. 



2 1 6 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

Compare it for imaginative energy, ingenuity, 
humor, any literary quality you like, with the fol- 
lowing selections from a recent volume on Ameri- 
canisms and slang : 

"See the elephant, crack up, make a kick, buck the 
tiger, jump on with both feet, go the whole hog, know 
the ropes, get solid, plank down, make the fur fly, put a 
bug in the ear, haloo, halloa, hello, and sometimes holler 
get the dead-wood on, die with your boots on, horn- 
swoggle, ker-flap, ker-splash, beat it, butt in, give a show- 
down, cut-up, kick-in, start-off, run-in, and jump off, put 
it over, put it across, don't be a high-brow, road-louse, 
sob-sister, lounge-lizard, rube, boob, kike, or has-been." 

The style of this paragraph is by no means so 
good as would have resulted from a more careful 
selection, for the words are taken at random and 
most of them are stale. Moreover, the words are 
not nearly so imaginative or vigorous as seven- 
teenth century terms, since forgotten by the minc- 
ing generations. The text, for example, is not 
for a moment to be compared with that of Sir 
Thomas Urquhart's "Rabelais." But even as it 
is, it is immeasurably better than my educational 
extract and it is just as pertinent to the subject of 
education — probably more so. The substitution 
of these lists for the usual university president's 
magazine contribution on educational reconstruc- 
tion problems would have helped just as much, if 
not more, to the solution of the problems, besides 



OUR REFINEMENT 2 1 7 

being pleasanter to read. Such lists might, I 
think, replace with advantage much of what is 
called "inspirational literature." "New Thought," 
for example, might have spared itself thousands 
upon thousands, of its pages by simple repetition 
of these lists. 

There were many barkeepers — in better days, 
of course- — who, if they could have learned the 
literary language without losing grip on their own, 
might have made good writers. There are no 
professors of English literature who could learn 
to write the language even if you gave them all 
the advantages of barkeepers. They lack the bar- 
keeper's line, reckless imagination in the use of 
words. They cannot appropriate a word, or 
stretch it, or make it do something it had not done 
before, or still less create it out of nothing. They 
could not even interest themselves in the "green" 
language ; their interest arises only when it is dry. 
Never, like a washwoman, or a poet, could they 
'add to the capacities of human speech. Their 
lives are spent in reducing them. Language would 
never grow if ruled by the American upper middle 
literary class. It would stiffen and die. Our college 
chairs of English and our magazines for "cul- 
tured" persons probably do more to prevent the 
adequate use of our common speech than any other 
influences. 

Distinguishable English sometimes may be 



2 1 8 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

found in an American newspaper ; it is never found 
in an American literary magazine. In some cor- 
ner of a newspaper you may find a man writing 
with freedom and -a sort of natural tact, choosing 
the words he really needs without regard to 
what is vulgar or what is polite. People are apt 
to read it aloud to you without knowing why; 
they like the sound of it. That never happens in a 
literary magazine. Nobody in a literary magazine 
fits words to thought; he fits his thoughts to* a 
borrowed diction. Nobody in a literary magazine 
cares a hang about the right word for the ex- 
pression of his thought but he is worried to death 
about diction. All the best contemporary literary 
essays are written in diction and there is no> more 
telling the writers apart, so far as their style is 
concerned, than if they were all buried in equally 
good taste by the same undertaker. 

Diction is the great funereal American literary 
substitute for style. Indeed that is what they 
mean when they praise an author's style. They 
do not mean that he has his own style of writing; 
they mean that he is in the style of writing. 

Measured by the vitality of masterpieces, news- 
paper English is sometimes fairly good; literary 
magazine English is never good. Bad English is 
English about to die, such as you see in the maga- 
zines ; the worst English is English that has never 
lived — it is the English of American belles-lettres. 



OUR REFINEMENT 219 

That is one of the reasons why I hate the self- 
improved, traveled American whom I meet in 
books and periodicals. I hate him also for what 
seems to me the servility of his spirit in the pres- 
ence of other people's past. I dare say it may be 
because I envy him his advantages. That is what 
the cultivated person always implies, and he wond- 
ers how any one, in view of the national crudity, 
can have the heart to find fault with these mis- 
sionaries of taste from a riper culture who have 
learned the value of artistic milieux and literary 
backgrounds. After all, he says, what Henry 
James would call the "European scene" may still 
be commended to Americans, and surely It is just 
as well that they should be reminded now and 
then of what Professor Barrett Wendell used so 
admirably to term their "centuries of social in- 
experience." Nevertheless as he goes on I not 
only feel that I am coarse, but I like the feeling of 
it; and for the sake of other people of my own 
coarse type I will present -here the excuses- of 
vulgarity. 

I have never been in Paterson, N. J., and I 
have never been in Venice, and so far as direct 
esthetic personal consequences to myself of golden 
hours of dalliance in the two places are concerned, 
I am therefore unable to offer a comparison. But 
during my life I have met many returned travelers 
from Venice and from Paterson and I have read 



220 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

or listened to their narratives with as much atten- 
tion as they could reasonably demand. Theoretic- 
ally, I accept the opinion of enlightened persons 
that Venice is superior, in respect to what edu- 
cators call its "cultural value," to Paterson. Prac- 
tically, and judging merely from the effects upon 
the respective visitors, I am all for Paterson. I 
have never met a man who returned from Pater- 
son talking like the stray pages of a catalogue, 
of which he had a complete copy before he started. 
Paterson never took away part of a man's mind 
and replaced it with a portion of an encyclopedia. 
Nobody ever came back from Paterson damaged 
as a man and yet inferior as a magazine article. 
For the careless person I should recommend Ven- 
ice; for the culture-seeker, Paterson. Overstrain, 
that misery of the conscientious self-improving 
man, with its disagreeable effects upon other peo- 
ple, could be avoided in Paterson. Out of ten 
essays on Venice that I have read, nine were writ- 
ten by fish out of water who might have swum 
easily and perhaps with grace in the artistic cur- 
rents of Paterson. 

!A self-improved American delivered an apolo- 
getic discourse the other day on the American de- 
ficiency in backgrounds. Culture cannot take root, 
he said; families float; everybody dies in a town 
he was not born in; art bombinates m a vacuum; 
literature gathers no moss; manners, when they 



OUR REFINEMENT 22 1 

exist at all, are accidental; history is clean gone 
out of our heads, while every Englishman is 
familiar with Bannockburn ; poetry cannot be writ- 
ten, and it is foolish to try, on account of the 
dearth of venerable circumstance; no traditions, 
no memories, no inheritance — in fact, no past at 
all; not even a present of any consequence, but 
only a future; and into this future every man, 
woman, and child in the whole foolish country is 
moving — though it is not through any fault of 
theirs for the unfortunate inhabitants really have 
no other place to go to. 

I bear no grudge against the author of this 
discourse as an individual, but only as a type. In- 
deed, I am not sure that he is an individual or 
that I have reported him correctly, for no sooner 
does any one begin in this manner than his words 
run into the words of others, forming a river of 
sound, and I think not of one man, but of strings 
of thern — all worrying about the lack of back- 
grounds, like the man who cast no shadow in the 
sun. I deny that it is any one's voluntary attitude ; 
it is a lockstep that began before I was born, and 
I have no doubt it will continue indefinitely. Seven 
centuries after Columbus's injudicious discovery 
they will still be complaining, with a Baedeker in 
their hands, of the fatal youth of North America. 
For they live long, these people, because, as in 
certain lower orders of animal life, apparently, 



222 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

there is hardly any life worth losing, and the 
family likeness they bear to one another is aston- 
ishing. The very ones that George William Cur- 
tis used to satirize as shining in society are still 
to be found among us at this moment, but tney are 
engaged for the most part in contributing to the 
magazines. In one respect they seem more the 
slaves of other people's backgrounds even than 
Mrs. Potiphar was. Mrs. Potiphar only believed 
that the right sort of liveries were not produced in 
this country, whereas they swear that the right 
sort of literature can never be produced in this 
country — or at least not till our backgrounds are 
ever so many centuries thicker than they are now. 
I am unable, looking back, to see any value what- 
ever in these decades of sheer sterile complaint of 
■sterility, because no ruins can be seen against the 
sky, because no naiads are dreamed of in the 
Hudson or mermaids in Cape Cod Bay, and be- 
cause most people who are born in Indianapolis 
seem glad to get away from it when they can. 

For one sign that we have changed too fast I 
can produce two signs that we have not changed 
half fast enough. If there is no moss here on 
the walls of ancient battlements there is plenty 
of moss in our heads, and, so far as tenacity of 
tradition is concerned, I can produce a dozen 
United States Senators who are fully as pic- 
turesque, if only you will regard them internally, 



OUR REFINEMENT 223 

as the quaintest peasant in the quaintest part of 
France. Backgrounds are not lost here just be- 
cause we move about; backgrounds are simply- 
worn inside, often with the ivy clustering on them. 
Who has not talked with some expatriated Boston 
man and found him as reposeful, as redolent of 
sad, forgotten, far-off things, as any distant pros- 
pect of Stoke-Pogis ? In fact, it seems as if these 
pale expositors of backgrounds had merely visited 
the monuments they praise — inside some Boston 
man — and that, I confess, is the most irritating 
thing to me about them. They have never really 
looked at anything themselves, but only learned 
from others what they ought to seem to see. And 
it is absurd to tax us with a lack of memory, when 
in some of our most exclusive literary circles there 
is notoriously nothing but a memory to be seen. 
There is too much Stoke-Pogis in a Boston man, 
if anything, in proportion to other things. Even 
the casual foreign visitor has noticed it. 

I have great respect for the religion of the 
Quakers, whose name, I understand, comes from 
the phrase of a founder about quaking and shak- 
ing in the fear of the Lord. And if that is the 
real reason why they quake I believe they are 
justified not only in their quaking, but in trying 
to make other people quake. But these Delsartean 
literary quakers correctly tremulous in the pres- 
ence of antiquity, these "cultured" minds, not only 



224 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

palsied by their own advantages, but intent on 
palsying others, bring back no good report to any- 
body in regard to the good things in the world. 

I do not know whether a poet, like a sugar 
beet, requires a soil with peculiar properties; and, 
in regard to the poet, I do not know what the 
peculiar properties ought to be. Zoning of verse, 
comparative literary crop statistics, mean annual 
density of ideas, ratio of true poetry to square 
miles and population within a given period, are 
all outside my limitations. The theory that bone- 
dust fertilizers are the things for poets does not 
always seem to work, even when the bone-dust is 
that of the Crusaders, and I have read lyrics from 
cathedral towns which, though infinitely more 
decorous than the brass band of my native village, 
were equally remote from literature. Still there 
may be something in it. But I do know, even 
better than I wish I did, two generations of writ- 
ers on the theme, who have been saying, with 
hardly any deviation in their phrases, that this is 
the land where poets cannot grow; and I know 
them for the sort of persons who, if by chance a 
poet should grow in defiance of their theory, 
could not tell him from a sugar beet. They are 
unaware of any growing thing which stands be- 
fore them unaccompanied by bibliography. Un- 
less there were antecedent books about an object 
they would not know that the object was a poet. 



OUR REFINEMENT 225 

As the words culture and refinement have been 
applied and as they have been exemplified in 
American letters they have come to carry a curse 
for all save little bands of unpleasant and self-con- 
scious persons who are themselves fidgetting about 
it. "Culture" is not absorbed, but packed in, al- 
ways with a view to being taken out again with- 
out a wrinkle in it, and it does nothing to the man 
who gets it, but he means to do a lot with it to 
you. It is absurd to suppose that the human con- 
tainer of it takes any personal interest in his 
contents. 

Of course I am not speaking of the essence of 
the thing, but only of the implications of the word 
as they have been seared into our social experi- 
ence. I do not mean that humane learning blasts 
an American, but I do mean that among those 
who are known as cultured Americans learning 
is not humane. And I am not condemning the 
present moment. It has nothing to do with the 
rudeness of young people, jazz bands, the corrup- 
tion of the English language, the cut of gowns 
down the back, war psychology, the Bolshevism 
of college professors, fox-trotting, the neglect of 
the classics, movies, commercialism, syndicalism, 
indecencies on the stage, popular novels, femin- 
ism, or any other of the unheard-of horrors that 
the middle-aged mind associates with the break- 
down of civilization. There is no sign that Amer- 



226 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

ican civilization is breaking down in this respect, 
for the simple reason that there is no sign that 
American civilization in this respect ever existed. 
There is no- sign that among any considerable 
body of cultured Americans learning was ever 
humane, and it is lucky for us that vivacious men 
at every period of our national life have revolted 
from it. Ten years of Greek study would not 
have hurt Mark Twain, but ten years' contact 
with the sort of persons who studied Greek would 
have destroyed him. Historical studies would not 
have suffocated Walt Whitman; even after read- 
ing Bishop Stuibbs he might have remained our 
poet of democracy. But association with modern 
historians would have done for him. Had Walt 
Whitman taken the same course that I did at a 
school of political science, he would have gone 
mad or become a college president. 

What was it that so pinched the mind of Henry 
Adams, readers of the Education of Henry 
Adams are always asking, though one would think 
the answer could not be missed. It was Boston 
and Cambridge in the eighteen-fifties and an acute 
personal consciousness of membership in the 
Adams family. It was a lucky thing for both 
Jews and Christians that Moses was not a cul- 
tured Boston man, for the Ten Commandments 
would not only have been multiplied by fifty, but 
a supplemental volume of thousands of really 



OUR REFINEMENT 227 

indispensable gentilities would have come out 
every year. No man knew better than the 
late W. D. Howells the Sinaitic rigor of the social 
scruple when the descendant of the Puritans once 
turned his conscience away from God and bent 
it upon culture. The genial tale of The Lady of 
the Aroostook might well have been a tragedy. 
Indeed, the passion of a man bred in the right 
Boston set and immensely conscious of it — a man 
who read the right books in the ri^ht way, knew 
the right people, visited the rig>ht places abroad — 
the passion of such a man for a girl who not only 
said "I want to know," but who had never heard 
of a chaperon — there is a situation not only tragic 
in itself, but close to the edge of violence, termin- 
able, one would say, only by accidental death, 
murder, or suicide. Desdemona was smothered 
for less. That Mr. Howells should see it to a 
comparatively cheerful end without calling down 
the lightning proves merely the magic of his 
hand. But Mr. Howells did not conceal one 
painful consequence. Hero and heroine both 
were outcasts from culture for evermore. Never 
again did they enter the doors of the right people 
of Cambridge. "He's done the wisest thing he 
could by taking her out to California. She never 
would have gone down here." This was the doom 
that culture pronounced in the final chapter. For, 
although at nineteen years of age Lydia ceased 



228 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION 

to say she wanted to know, the early stain re- 
mained. She bore it to the grave. And this end- 
ing was entirely just and Mr. Howells did not ex- 
aggerate in the slightest degree the rigors of the 
law, for, though Lydia as he made her was the 
most natural and adorable creature imaginable, 
he was right in saying that in the cultured circles 
of the time and place she would not have gone 
down. 

The taboo of culture is of course no new thing, 
but dates from a comparatively ancient grudge in 
our brief literary history. People are ashamed of 
their culture nowadays, a friend of mine was say- 
ing, and he went on to oite instances of the ex- 
clusion from human intercourse of all those mat- 
ters of general interest which make intercourse 
human. And why are you so afraid of general 
ideas? one visiting Frenchman after another has 
asked me, and I have never yet been able to think 
of a suitable reply. And they go back to France 
on no better terms with the English language than 
when they came. It is impossible to arouse any 
enthusiasm for our spoken language in a French- 
man, for he does not believe that conversation in 
his sense of the word is ever carried on in it. 
And he is certainly right. The range of a quite 
ordinary Frenchman's every-day talk is not gen- 
erally permitted in this country. Religion may 
be discussed with a French chauffeur on a footing 



OUR REFINEMENT 229 

of naturalness absolutely out of place at an 
American authors' club. You may confess a 
literary taste to a French washwoman, but not to 
a New York banker. The philosophic specula- 
tions of French barber shops would be shockingly 
pedantic at our dinner tables. 

Of course the main reason why the conversa- 
tion of a novelist does not differ from that of a 
shoe manufacturer is simply because as a rule 
there is no real difference between them. But 
there is sometimes another side to it. The man 
of letters who excludes letters from his talk is 
not necessarily ashamed of them. But he knows 
the traditional association in this country of 
culture with ennui, and he knows that it is amply 
justified. Acquaintance with the personalities of 
cultured groups naturally disposes a sensitive 
mind to the cultivation of an appearance of 
illiteracy. Thought is not a social nuisance in 
this country, but thinkers generally are. Hence, 
when seized by an irresistible impulse to express 
any sort of an idea, a well-bred man will always 
leave the room, just as he would do if seized by 
an uncontrollable fit of coughing. 



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